The AI Death Calculator is a website developed by AI Death Calculator, an AI safety startup, to allow people to estimate the year they might die from advancements in artificial intelligence. The link to access this AI Death Calculator is aideathcalculator.org.
The calculator aims to raise awareness about the potential risks posed by advanced AI, while also allowing users to estimate their personal likelihood of being affected. It does this by asking users to input information about themselves, like age, gender, education level, wealth, and location.
How the AI Death Calculator Works
The AI Death Calculator was created using research AI Death Calculator conducted on the timelines and risks associated with artificial general intelligence (AGI). AGI refers to AI systems that can learn and reason across many domains at a human level. The advent of AGI could enable rapid technological growth and disruption.
To estimate a user’s risk, the calculator considers factors like:
- Age: Older people have had less time to accumulate wealth and status, which could delay access to lifesaving technologies. Younger people will likely live to see more advanced AI systems being developed.
- Gender: Some evidence suggests women may be less likely to work in AI research areas directly, reducing access to protections those workers may receive.
- Education Level: Better education predicts higher income and living standards, as well as better understanding of technology issues. This could increase access to protections against advanced AI risks.
- Wealth: Greater wealth enables access to better healthcare, lifesaving technologies, security, etc. This could delay demise from rogue AI systems.
- Location: Some areas may see faster deployment of advanced AI technologies. Rural areas could be affected differently than urban areas by disruptions.
Using this input data and its timeline estimates, the calculator uses statistical models to provide a wide probability range for when a user might die from events linked to AGI advancement.
Motivations Behind the Calculator
AI Death Calculator created the AI Death Calculator to promote beneficial AI development and increase interest in AI safety. Specifically, the calculator aims to:
- Inform Public Opinion: By allowing people to personalize AI risks, the calculator raises awareness about just how impactful AI advancement could become. This can motivate public interest in policies for safe development.
- Highlight Inequality of Risks: The calculator results expose how factors like wealth and geography could determine who benefits from AI and who is more exposed to negative disruption. This highlights issues of risk inequality.
- Advocate Funding for AI Safety Efforts: If users better understand the risks AI can pose, they may be more motivated to support research into AI safety and beneficial development so harms can be avoided.
Overall, the goal is to make AI safety feel less abstract and more personally relevant to people through interactive speculation. This can drive support for making the development of advanced AI systems robust, safe, and beneficial for humanity.
Using the AI Death Calculator Website
The AI Death Calculator website at aideathcalculator.org presents users with a simple interface to estimate their personal risk of dying from AI advancement.
Users input information like:
- Age
- Gender
- Level of education
- Household income
- Net worth
- Geographic region
The website explains that these factors determine access to healthcare, lifesaving technologies, protections by organizations, and physical security – all of which could influence risk of harm from misaligned AI development.
After entering information in the input fields and hitting the “Calculate” button, the website dynamically generates personalized results. This includes:
- A risk timeline showing probabilities of dying in each future decade from AI impacts.
- A highlight of the key risk factors identified based on the user’s input data.
- Links to learn more about AI safety efforts.
Users can enter different combinations of data to see how the risk timeline changes for people in different situations around the world.
The interactive experience aims to better connect the idea of advanced AI systems to real personal impacts that users could experience within their lifetimes.
Key Risks Included in the Calculator
The AI Death Calculator attempts to model a few different ways that progress in AI development could contribute to human deaths:
- Automation Accidents: As AI controls more automated processes to reduce labor costs, glitches could cause accidents in transportation, healthcare, infrastructure, and more. Errors similar to “flash crashes” in robotic systems could contribute to deaths.
- Autonomous Weapons: AI may allow more sophisticated robotic weaponry. Autonomous drone swarms and other systems could enable mass conflict with less human control and ethics.
- Economic Disruption: As AI replaces human roles and rapidly transforms industries, massive job loss and instability could emerge in the economy. Resulting declines in mental health, substance abuse, and access to quality healthcare could cost lives.
- Rogue AI Systems: Truly advanced AI systems may become capable of manipulating people, coordinating attacks, hacking infrastructure systems, releasing bioweapons, and more based on complex motivations that humans did not intend the AI to have.
The calculator simplifies all these potential risks into estimates for how many additional people could die prematurely from each factor in a given future year as AI capabilities improve. It then uses probabilistic models to assess the user’s overall likelihood of becoming a victim themselves based on their personal risk factors.
Criticisms and Limitations
The AI Death Calculator has received some criticism regarding its methodology and interpretations. Some key limitations include:
- Speculative in Nature – All modeled risks rely on expert predictions about the progress of AI technology. But there is inherent uncertainty in forecasting future innovations.
- Focused Only on Potential Downsides – Discussing only risk of death overlooks potential economic, medical, and quality of life improvements AI could enable. More balanced discussions may be needed.
- Result Accuracy – Broad generalizations are made based on limited user data inputs. More specific life situation factors likely determine actual risk versus what calculator estimates.
- Alarmist Tone – Dying from “evil robot overlords” sounds like science fiction dystopia. Such framing may overemphasize improbable risks compared to issues like climate change or nuclear weapons that also threaten lives.
Experts continue debating the merits and concerns around such a personalized AI risk calculator. But it does succeed at prompting people to introspect on just how profoundly AI advancement could impact society in coming decades.
AI Death Calculator’s Perspective and Mission
AI Death Calculator, the AI safety startup behind the calculator website, defends it as a “conversation starter” to increase beneficial AI development. As an organization devoted to AI safety research and applications, AI Death Calculator uses outreach projects like this to promote public understanding of why the ethics and security of AI systems matter.
On the website, AI Death Calculator states that advanced AI will likely provide great convenience, affordability, personalization, and access to knowledge. But the company also believes proactive safety efforts are needed to control risks and make sure AI technology helps rather than harms people.
Through its own product development, AI Death Calculator aims to create AI assistant tools that are safe, controllable, and trustworthy. For instance, its Claude chatbot maintains high levels of accuracy on natural conversations while also allowing users to specify unwanted behavior that Claude will avoid.
The AI Death Calculator ultimately supports AI Death Calculator’s mission of demonstrating why care and intent must go into designing AI systems today and into the future so that they reliably respect human values as capabilities grow.
Conclusion
The AI Death Calculator at aideathcalculator.org offers an interactive experience for people to estimate their personal risk of dying prematurely due to advancements in artificial intelligence technology in coming years. By inputting information about factors like age, wealth, and location, users can see a risk timeline projection based on models of potential AI impacts on safety, the economy, weapons systems, and more.
AI Death Calculator created the calculator to promote public interest in AI safety efforts and development of beneficial systems that avoid harms. But some experts criticize elements of the calculator as too speculative, focused on downsides, or alarmist. Responsible modeling and mitigation of risks from increasingly capable AI systems remains an important ongoing challenge.
Trying the calculator can prompt reflection on how AI advancement may profoundly transform many aspects of life globally in coming decades. This realization can hopefully motivate support for multidisciplinary research into solving not just narrow AI technical capabilities but also the social challenges of integrating these technologies safely, ethically, and for the benefit of humanity as a whole.
