People save more for retirement when they see older versions of themselves, so Merrill Edge is more than happy to make you look old and wrinkly.
By Colin Lecher Posted 12.12.2012 at 5:00 pm 11 Comments

Happy Old Man
Happy Old Man Wikimedia Commons

Did you know that if you see an age-enhanced version of yourself, you're more likely to save extra money for retirement? Stanford researchers know, because they studied that effect in 2011, and Bank of America division Merrill Edge knows, because they're pointing to the Stanford study as the rationale behind a newly released online digital-aging program that exists to remind you that you're going to get old and die.

Morbid? Oh, yeah. But Face Retirement, as it's called, has a practical goal: to encourage users to save money for retirement. Just upload a normal photo with your age and gender and the program will spit back an aged photo, guess the cost of living in the future, give you options to start saving, and let you share your presumably frugal future self with friends on Facebook.

Saving for retirement is a good thing, obviously. Still, this is a little messed up. Why can't corporations these days just be straightforward when they're trying to make us panic about the future?

[Merrill Edge]

11 Comments

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yosifcuervo
12/12/12 at 5:49 pm

Lets just say I do not age as gracefully as the happy man in the picture above...

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Robot
12/12/12 at 7:37 pm

yosifcuervo,
Besides this article and program being interesting, you have been tricked into providing on the internet your face along with you login. ;)

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African Rover
12/13/12 at 4:03 am

So you save and invest and then the bankers and the brokers will loose your money and the state will wipe out your efforts with inflation. And if after all that you still have anything left, the medical profession like vultures will descend onto you and clean you out. And eventually you will resemble jolly roger on a pirates flag. No software needed to work that out.

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starfire42
12/13/12 at 4:07 pm

I wonder what would this would do with a picture of my 80-year-old grandmother (proud to still be living in her own home).

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darkbreeze
12/14/12 at 1:58 am

Actually, this is a federal government ploy to create a collection of face recognition databases similar to the fingerprint file the FBI keeps on record and will be capable of identifying you even later in life due to the same application used for the Face retirement application. Another step forward in the Big brother program. Heh.

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berk99
12/15/12 at 4:16 pm

Do they also ask for your name, DOB and SS number? And on a twist of starfire42, can I put a picture of my 85 year old dad in this and see what he looked like at 20?

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quasi44
12/21/12 at 10:43 pm

So then, if I were a scumbag banker, Bank of America, for example, then I'd be thinking about that little thing in there that most readers will ignore. My fancy new scumbag tool would get to make the guesstimate of future cost of living of every single one of my suckers, er, clients, on an individual basis, based entirely on what the slob, er, client, earns. Cool beans.

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arnolddurham
01/28/13 at 3:11 am

I would want to look like this old man in my old age.

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PooPoo1
02/02/13 at 4:42 pm

Robot, are you supposed to be some sort of gay Vanilla Ice?

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collegechristopher90
03/02/13 at 6:01 pm

Well that was a waste of time... not only was that software embarrassing for Bank of America, but it was embarrassing that Popular Science deemed it worthy of space on their website. I know high school students who have written better aging software than that.

On top of that, you mislead us with falsified pictures. Everyone who read this article assumed that the photo of the old man was a result of this aging software, when in fact you just got it off Wikipedia. You should be ashamed.

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salah42
03/25/13 at 6:11 pm

Robot, are you supposed to be some sort of gay Vanilla Ice

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