Background
Something I think about a lot: most people make an enormous effort to avoid death and even things that vaguely remind them of death. I don’t think this is a new phenomenon, but at the same time it seems that sometimes people think that continuing technological advancements will help to distance themselves from it by prolonging life, maybe in hopes of eluding death altogether. Many people spend exorbitant amounts of money to look younger, or some to live their ideas of healthier lives. There’s no wrong or right in these decisions, but I think it’s really interesting to step back and assess them in order to understand how our thoughts about death impact the way we live. For me, it’s been even more beneficial to think about death on a regular basis, and to not necessarily view it as good or bad, but to accept its inevitability and to maybe grow comfortable with it.
Project
I’m kind of inspired by an app called WeCroak that sends notifications 5 times a day with quotes, essentially just little reminders about death; for my project, I really want to make something that just reminds people that they (and everything around them) will die at some point through the use of machine learning. What I’d like to do is create a sort of image classification project, but instead of labelling objects with names, they will be labelled with lifespans.
Initially I thought it could be really interesting for it to be able to guess the remaining time left in an object’s lifespan, but for that to work it would have to know object lifespan – object age = object remaining time. I think this could be next to impossible to achieve, especially for inanimate objects. To add to this, even though there are beta versions of age guessing programs for humans, I think these come with a lot of ethical problems before even being implemented into another project, in addition to already being inaccurate. There’s something a little too extreme about a death countdown when all I want is to provide a gentle reminder.
Methodology
With just providing lifespans as labels, the project seems like it will mostly be a matter of manipulating datasets. I don’t really have much experience with that, which is why I think it would be a good opportunity to learn. Because it seems really tedious to try to do this manually, and maybe not possible to finish in the time given, I’m going to do some research to see if there is an API for objects’ lifespans that I can potentially weave in with the image recognition to avoid this.
Reference
WeCroak app: https://www.wecroak.com