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A new artificial intelligence (AI) system, named Centaur, can predict human behavior with a never-before-seen degree of accuracy. It can do this “in any situation” and has the ability to accurately predict human reactions and decisions to those situations. These new AI abilities have caused some scientists to be very inspired while others admit to being terribly frightened by it.

Centaur beats classic psychological models

According to research published in the journal Nature, Centaur was trained by studying over 10 million decisions made by more than 60,000 real human participants of 160 psychological experiments.

“Essentially, we show the model a full transcript of a psychological experiment from a participant — everything they were told, have seen and have done,” study lead author Marcel Binz, a research scientist at the Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI in Germany, told Live Science.

Using this information, the AI model predicted how people would think, react, and behave with 64% accuracy. It is that type of accuracy allowed Centaur to outperform classic psychology models in 31 out of 32 benchmark tests.

The scientists who created Centaur say its “potential applications range from analyzing classic psychological experiments to simulating individual decision-making processes in clinical contexts — for example, in depression or anxiety disorders. The model opens up new perspectives in health research in particular — for example, by helping us understand how people with different psychological conditions make decisions.”

Centaur raises numerous concerns, and questions

“What makes Centaur unique is its ability to predict human behavior not only in familiar tasks, but also in entirely new situations it has never encountered before,” the researchers said in a statement. “It identifies common decision-making strategies, adapts flexibly to changing contexts — and even predicts reaction times with surprising precision.”

The researchers now hope to use Centaur as a proxy for the human brain by adding demographic and psychological data, including age, socioeconomic status, and personality traits. The goal being for Centaur to predict behavior based on an individual’s characteristics, Live Science reports.

“This scares me,” said NBC Palm Springs contributor and life coach Sue Abramowitz. “AI like this could influence people in ways they don’t even realize, and that raises serious concerns about privacy and control.”

“Making predictions is not the same as understanding how the mind works,” Olivia Guest of Radboud University in the Netherlands warned.

“Is it modeling human mental processes, or just mimicking the outcomes?” Brenden Lake, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Psychology at New York University wondered to Live Science. If it is actually modeling human behavior, he says, it could be used to “simulate the effects of different teaching strategies,” which would, in theory, be a positive.