Scientists have recently harnessed artificial intelligence (AI) to build “aging clocks” that aim to estimate a person’s true biological age.
While a person’s chronological age reflects the number of years they’ve been alive, their biological age is intended to capture how well their bodily systems are functioning. The idea is that people with older biological ages have a higher risk of age-related diseases — such as cancer, heart disease or dementia — while younger biological ages come with less risk. Some aging clocks even aim to predict people’s impending risk of death.
Many aging clocks look at epigenetic markers, meaning chemical tags that bind DNA and change how genes activate, while others measure features such as the pace and pitch of people’s voices. But some scientists say we don’t know how to use these aging clocks yet, arguing that the tools are useful for studying aging at a population level but not for guiding individual health decisions.
Others posit that the data the clocks are based on is too noisy, and thus, there’s potential for drawing faulty conclusions about what they’re measuring. They say, for example, that we don’t know if the clocks are measuring the downstream effects of aging or its underlying causes. And in any case, we don’t currently have any treatments to “wind back” the clocks.
What do you think? Would you use these AI tools to measure your biological age? Let us know in the poll below, and explain your reasoning and additional thoughts about the technology in the comments.
