Artificial Intelligence Can Predict When You'll Die

When patients receive a terminal cancer diagnosis, they are often given a frustratingly vague sense of how much time they have left. "You've got x months/years to live," they're typically told, a sentiment aimed at allowing patients to get their lives in order, maybe even live their last days with aplomb. But physicians are human, and forecasting like this is wrought with not only errors but also the pain of planning for a death that may or may not happen in the given time frame. In many cases--partially because the awkwardness of having to communicate that the end of a patient's life looms near, and partially because humans are not good at predicting--the end-of-life time frame is off, forecasted to be way more in the future than it actually is. That leaves some patients scrambling to stitch together end-of-life care, and makes what was supposed to be as comfortable and peaceful a process as possible actually more stressful and wretched.