WHats off if you invent a magic mirror that could tell you how long you left? He could see your deadly soul with a glance on your face: how quickly your body was getting older, how fast your clock turned to death. Would you like to try it?
I have irritated my photo with a new AI system called faceage, which promises this kind of judgment. I felt fatally calm while waiting for the results until I speak to one of his inventors, Raymond Mak. Very early on, Mak decided that he would not hear his own mortality via his machine.
Are you afraid, I ask. Afraid of the power of what you had done? It is difficult to believe it of this associate professor of radiotherapy in Harvard Medical School. But the more I speak to him for a long time and his co-founder Hugo Aerts, his colleague Professor Harvard and director of the artificial intelligence program in Medicine in general Brigham, the more worried I feel.
They have proven in a large clinical trial that the more you look – for faceage – the earliest you will die. Although her decision on my photo takes some time because it must be sent by e-mail to Harvard and vice versa, in practice, the faceage makes its judgment in fraction of a second and a simple selfie. He also laughs at the primitive ideas of humanity of aging, distracted by gray hair or wrinkles. It sees us aging in a way that we cannot ourselves, throwing a ruthless eye on muscles, bones and eyes.
Not only does the pair believe that this AI could be used benignly as a “fifth vital sign” (after temperature, heart rate, respiratory frequency and blood pressure) to help medical decisions, but it has almost unfathomable consequences for society. In an instant, we could see the potential longevity of anyone, of a potential husband to a presidential candidate, whether he likes it or not. Or get a morning mortality report on our own reflection in a smart mirror. What we might want to remain secret, our face, like a window, betrayed.
“It was like a Gattaca Thing, “says Mak via a video call, referring to the science fiction film in which humans were stratified by their propensity for illness.” Do I really want to know? I don’t really want to know.
We live in a world that has become obsessed, whether through filters on social networks or surgery, with facial youth. In The image of Dorian GrayOscar Wilde seemed to summarize in 2025 when he wrote: “They are only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The real mystery of the world is visible, not the invisible.” Facing is the perfect technology for the mind of our time: health is indeed deep.
• Night skin care: 5 of the best night products
“How old is you aware of,” said Aerts. “If you look older than your peers, you will die earlier. No one has shown this direct correlation between the two before.”
Mak and Aerts have long collaborated in training machines to help the precision of doctors, for example to improve the detection of tumors in analyzes. One day, they had the idea that they could help doctors not only with analyzes, but a metric doctor uses to make medical decisions that change life every day, alias “The eyed test”. Mak explained that the eyeball test is particularly important in its field of oncology. If he sees two patients of the same age with the same cancer, and one is limited to the pink cheeks to shovel snow, and the other looks crumpled and sick, Mak will be inclined to assume that the first will resist a more brutal and powerful treatment diet.
But what happens if doctors were wrong with their own capacities? Aerts and Mak conducted a study in which eight oncologists and palliative care specialists were shown faces of 100 terminal patients, and asked to judge who lasted six months. On average, they obtained around 60% of the time, according to a study that the pair published in an article by Lancet Digital Health Journal this month. “Not much better than a draw,” says Mak.
Is the house to take away is that humans are not excellent to assess mortality from a photo? “Absolutely.” When these doctors have also received the patient’s medical history, reflecting the type of judgment that these experts make thousands of times in their career, their precision has improved at around 70%. It is worth keeping this margin of error in mind if you receive a vital prognosis. Could a computer do better?
• Read more expert advice on healthy life, physical form and well-being
Aerts and Mak were able to work on the formation of their AI. Great attention has recently been paid to facial estimation applications formed on the faces of adolescents, mainly used to launch social media and pornographic sites. Facing would be the opposite: training has to identify the signs of our cellular resilience is ending, aka “biological age”. He focuses on life after death, rather than Instagram.
For the study, the faceage was applied to more than 6,000 cancer patients who were about to start treatment for radiology, using photos by technical staff. It had been trained on data sets of nearly 60,000 alleged healthy people – a number that has since reached 40 million.
“He said cancer patients had an average of five more years,” said Mak. “It was then that we realized that it could be something real, not a gadget.” The more their cancer, the more they looked. The next step was to assess if “older air” according to AI had a meaning, and it did. The older AI estimated the age of the cancer patient, earlier they died.
“These are the two great moments aha,” says Mak. “It was a clinically significant signal, it was a prognostic. There was useful biological information anchored in the face … You will do worse the oldest you look at. You are more likely to die. “
• The man who will live in 180 (or die by trying)
How does Facing do better than our perception of our age? It is not embarrassed by the traditional signs of aging, ensured by makeup, hair transplants or loads. It seems to examine the areas that we do not know, like the size of the temporalis, a muscle that governs the strength of the bites. “This is not something we expected,” says Aerts. The loss of this muscle appears hollow at the temple level, which can be a subtle marker for global fragility.
AI also seems interested in ineffable insufficiency of the eyes. Then, the width of the nose bone, which is flocked with age. Thus, the only cosmetic surgery that is disjointed is rhinoplasty, which, according to faceage, makes an older person. When the faceage was invited to predict who of the terminal phase dies in six months simply from a photo, this properly made more than 80% of the time, beating the specialized doctors who had access to complete medical history.
Should doctors be wary of the eyeball test in the future? “I think yes,” says Mak. “Some doctors could say,” I don’t need AI to tell me how old is someone. “It can be fair, but why not have a tool to improve your judgment a little?”
Does this lead to the integration of AI into the bathroom mirror or your smartphone camera, exclaiming: “Oh, guy, you look tough today!” And alert your general practitioner?
“Absolutely,” said Mak. Their research shows that repeated photos over time are even more powerful and precise than snapshot. “Having an old age is bad; fast aging is super bad – you are even more likely to die.”
Mak says that the scientist knows that they have years of research before Facing can be used as a biomarker in a clinical environment, “but the futuristic in me believes that this is where it goes.” Aerts adds: “It would be the dream, that it is your early alert system.” Hey, something is in place! We don’t know what, but go see your doctor. “”
The ease of a photo is the blessing and the cursing of faceage. The pair is deprived with ethical dilemmas that no one has imagined yet. “Our team is all a little afraid of abusive use,” said Aerts.
The kiss of a camera lens is less invasive than a blood test or an MRI, but these tests are confidential. Facing is invasive in another way: anyone with your photo could potentially check your biological age. Do you want this to be part of the recruitment process for your next CEO? Or Prime Minister? Or health insurance? Your consent can be out of words if your vacation shots are everywhere on Instagram.
“You can enter your grocery store and they could do an instant health assessment of you from your photo,” said Aerts. “It’s possible, and it’s not even a gadget. We can predict the biological age of this individual, and it is important to know how much they will die.
I asked Aerts if he had been tempted to manage an entire bank of photos of characters well known by the face, and he replied that collectively, they had decided. He ran it on himself and he guessed his age fairly precisely, although he warns that he is less reliable in under 50. Last month, Mak finally gave up and did it nervously on himself: he said that he was 10 years younger than his real age of 46. “I was surprised,” said Mak. He has three young children “and at the moment I feel more at 60”.
I recover my results. Each of my three photos, one without makeup, places me somewhere in the thirties – one as young as 32 years old, two decades less than my chronological age. At first, I’m happy, of course, but I am not. My family is riddled with genetic diseases that took my parents too early and my knees break like sticks. If Faceage had said that I looked ten years younger, I would have been encouraged. However, this enormous gap now makes it that everything feels simmered, more like the shady server who claims that I am my teenage daughter’s sister. Oh, faceage, I don’t fall in love with your stuff.
