Science & Cocktails: Predicting human life

Science & Cocktails is a series of public talks by scientists with live music and smoky dry-ice chilled cocktails in your hand

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Predicting Human Life

If we had extremely detailed data about every person in an entire country... what could we really know? Could we predict when someone will die? And what happens when we include not just individual data, but entire social networks? Family, friends, colleagues? How predictable are human lives, actually?

A few years ago, speaker Sune Lehmann had a striking realization: Large Language Models aren’t really about language. They’re about sequences. Language just happens to be one of the most refined systems of sequences we have: words unfolding according to grammar, context, and social rules. But what if we apply that same logic to something else?

Human lives can also be understood as sequences. You are born, assigned a birth weight, move to a certain address, start school, meet people, change jobs. Step by step, a life unfolds. Using Denmark’s uniquely detailed registry data, Sune Lehmann and his team trained a new kind of model; one that treats life itself as data. The result is a system that can detect patterns in human lives with remarkable precision.

During this edition, Sune Lehmann takes us inside this radical approach to understanding human lives and the questions it raises about prediction, privacy, and what it means to be human.

About
This event is an initiative by the Dutch Institute for Emergent Phenomena (DIEP) with the support of the University of Amsterdam. Science & Cocktails Amsterdam is presented in cooperation with Paradiso Amsterdam