The Puzzling Persistence of Age Progression Technology

Now readily available as an app or filter, age progression technology, which speculates on the appearance of our future faces, was designed to apprehend fugitives and locate missing children. The fear that fueled the development of this technology helped justify its continued application despite limited success in making identifications. In this case study, we explore its growth and enduring prominence in a variety of contexts despite the fact that, as a way to accurately identify people through aging them, it does not work very well. I explore the technical and cultural history of age progression from early innovations in criminal forensic art in the 1950s through its use to age the appearance of kidnapped kids. The development and deployment of age progression technology is fundamentally intertwined with widespread alarm about predators and strangers, exacerbated by the “stranger danger” media panic of the 1980s. The story of age progression technology and its persistence highlights the gaps between technological promise (“this will recover your missing children”) and outcomes, while at the same time serving a powerful social purpose (“we are still looking,” “we are doing something”) that is controlled by and benefits criminal justice institutions as much as the families and communities it purports to protect. I discuss questions of privacy and dissemination alongside recent uses of age progression for data mining and consumer product development and marketing. In the process, this case study points our attention to the way that the application of technology is intimately tied to its development, and insists that we must always ask, “but what is it for?”