Could an AI ‘death calculator’ actually be a good thing?

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The writer is a science commentator

Our lives, like stories, follow narrative arcs. Each one unfolds uniquely in chapters bearing familiar headings: school, career, moving home, injury, illness. Each storyline, or life, has a beginning, a middle and an unpredictable end. 

Now, according to scientists, each life story is the chronicle of a death foretold. By using Denmark’s registry data, which contains a wealth of day-to-day information on education, salary, job, working hours, housing and doctor visits, academics have developed an algorithm that can predict a person’s life course, including premature death, in much the same way that large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT can predict sentences. The algorithm outperformed other predictive models, including actuarial tables used by the insurance industry.

That our complex existences can be parsed like scraps of text is both exhilarating and disconcerting. While we know that a generous income correlates with longer life expectancy, linking vast amounts of different data could unmask other ways in which social factors affect health. That could inform policymakers seeking to improve our odds of living longer, healthier lives.

On the minus side, there is something almost absurdly reductive about the idea of a DeathGPT. Each bead on the necklace of life — attending a class, a salary increase, losing a parent — feels too personal to power a predictable data set. But, in an age of big data, and AI to mine it, we will need to accept that those deeply felt qualitative experiences can be captured quantitatively in ways that, within error bars, sketch out individual destiny.

Sune Lehmann, from the Technical University of Denmark, who led the research published last month in Nature Computational Science, does not find the idea discombobulating. “I think the similarity between text and lives is deep and…