This algorithm could predict your health, income, and chance of premature death

If you could flip ahead a few pages in the story of your life, would you take a peek? Artificial intelligence (AI) may now offer a version of this choice, say researchers behind a study out today in Nature Computational Science . By crunching data from millions of people’s lives, the authors note, a fortune-telling algorithm can predict a person’s life outcomes with eerie accuracy, such as their lifetime earnings or their likelihood of facing an early death. The finding adds to a recent trend blending machine learning with the social sciences . If the approach can be shown to work across different societies, it could give social scientists a new tool to explore how traits and events affect a person’s fate, says Matthew Salganik, a sociologist at Princeton University who was not involved in the work. “I think it raises more questions than it answers. And I mean that in a positive way.” Previously, Salganik and collaborators—along with more than 100 other teams—attempted to develop machine learning models to predict life outcomes using data on health, family relationships, and education from about 5000 children over 15 years. Yet none of their models yielded accurate predictions . In the new study, researchers turned to a different type of model: large language models, like the kind that power ChatGPT. These algorithms first analyze huge amounts of text, looking for patterns in strings of words and sentence...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research