Name: FaceAge.
Age: New.
Appearance: A computer that predicts how long you’ll live.
So, it will tell me when I’ll die? No thanks. Wait, I haven’t even explained it yet.
Doesn’t matter, it’s still the most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard. No, give it a chance. FaceAge is only doing what doctors already do.
Which is what? Visually assessing you to obtain a picture of your health.
Oh, that doesn’t sound so bad. But FaceAge can do it much more accurately, to the point that it can predict whether or not you’ll survive treatment.
No, I’m out again. I’ll explain more. FaceAge is an AI tool created by scientists at Mass General Brigham in Boston. By looking at a photo of your face, it can determine your biological age as opposed to your chronological age.
What does that mean? It means that everyone ages at different speeds. At the age of 50, for example, Paul Rudd had a biological age of 43, according to researchers. But at the same age, fellow actor Wilford Brimley had a biological age of 69.
And why does this matter? People with older biological ages are less likely to tolerate an aggressive treatment such as radiotherapy.
Repeat all that as if I’m an idiot. OK. The older your face looks, the worse things are for you.
Great news for the prematurely grey, then. Actually, no. Things like grey hair and baldness are often red herrings. FaceAge can give a better picture of someone’s health by assessing the skin folds on your mouth or the hollowing of your temples.
Right, I’ll just be off to obsessively scrutinise the state of my temples. No, this is a good thing. A diagnostic tool like this, used properly, could improve the quality of life of millions of people. Although the initial research was confined to cancer patients, scientists plan to test FaceAge with other conditions.
I’ve recently had plastic surgery. Will FaceAge still work on me? Unsure, actually. The creators still need to check that.
And what about people of colour? Ah, yes, about that. The model was primarily trained on white faces, so there’s no real telling how well it can adapt to other skin tones.
This is starting to sound dodgy. Just teething problems. Look how fast AI can improve. Last year, ChatGPT was a useless novelty. Now it’s going to destroy almost every labour market on Earth. You’d have to assume that FaceAge will rapidly improve as well.
That’s reassuring. Yes. Before we know it, it’ll be scanning your face and instantly making a chillingly objective judgment call on whether you deserve to live or die.
My God, will it? No, of course not. Not yet, anyway.
Do say: “FaceAge is the new frontier of medical diagnostics.”
Don’t say: “It says I’m going to die three seconds into the robot uprising of 2028.”
