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.