Science and Cocktails Amsterdam

I’m excited to be heading to Amsterdam on May 19th to give a public lecture at Science and Cocktails, at Tolhuistuin.

The talk is titled “Predicting Human Life”, and the S&C team framed it up like this:

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.

The whole thing is part of the University of Amsterdam IAS Festival 2026, organized by DIEP, with music from local punk supergroup My Purse.

The last time I did one of these was at Christiania in Copenhagen, back in May 2014 — I wrote about it on the blog, and the video sits on the videos page. One of my favorite talks ever, so coming back to the series twelve years on, almost to the day, feels like a small homecoming.

Doors at 19:00, programme at 19:30. Tickets via Paradiso Amsterdam. If you’re in town, come say hi.