Predicting Future Life Events Using A.I.

How the technology powering AlphaGo can learn the rules of life

This post is part of an ongoing series of research updates by Bambu, a financial technology company I started in 2016. The theme of these posts is predicting the future. You can find part one here, sharing the results of a survey we ran about people’s attitude towards their future. Part two, here, reviews historical and current methods of prediction.

For the last 18 months, I’ve been working on a project to predict the future. No, don’t close this browser tab yet! Hear me out. As I’ve explained before in my review of prediction methods, people have been predicting the future for ages. We’ve tried all sorts of things, for all sorts of reasons. Some nobler than others.

Well, assuming we could predict the future at all, what would we want to know? We asked that very question from 100 people, check that out here for the results. The takeaway is that people want and don’t want to know the same things. We’re curious and frightened about our frailty and mortality. Humans be like that sometimes.

The topic of this post, however, is to finally open the lid and share more about what we’re doing about it.

Why we are interested in the future

First off, it’s best to establish our motives. Are we an evil corporation seeking to exploit the future and build an A.I. system to control the masses? No, that…