Who needs the answers to life?

Imagine knowing if you are at risk of getting cancer or not. Imagine knowing if you will battle to have a baby or will be fertile. Imagine knowing at what age you’ll die or if you’re destined to make a lot of money.

Well, a group of researchers in Denmark are using artificial intelligence and data from around six million Danes to hopefully do just that by analysing variables impacting life, such as “birth, education, social benefits or even work schedules”.

ALSO READ: Dell strengthens collaboration to help enterprises adopt AI tech

Although it’s just a research tool for now, the creators of life2vec “want to explore patterns and relationships that so-called deep-learning programmes can uncover to predict a wide range of health or social life-events”.

Sune Lehmann, a professor at the Technical University of Denmark and one of the authors of a study recently published in the journal, Nature Computational Science, said: “It could predict health outcomes. So it could predict fertility or obesity, or you could maybe predict who will get cancer or who doesn’t get cancer.

ALSO READ: How AI could help solve your insurance claim troubles

“But it could also predict if you’re going to make a lot of money. From one perspective, lives are simply sequences of events: people are born, start school, move to a new location, get married, and so on.”

It’s not unique to Denmark. Some insurance companies have already used similar algorithms. Whether we like it or not, the possibilities of AI are endless.

The question remains, though, do we actually want to live life knowing these answers?