Judgmental A.I. mirror rates how trustworthy you are based on your looks

As the success of the iPhone X's Face ID confirms, lots of us are thrilled to bits at the idea of a machine that can identify us based on our facial features. But how happy would you be if a computer used your facial features to start making judgments about your age, your gender, your race, your attractiveness, your trustworthiness, or even how kind you are? Chances are that, somewhere down the line, you'd start to get a bit freaked out. Especially if the A.I. in question was using this information in a way that controlled the opportunities or options that are made available to you. Exploring this tricky (and somewhat unsettling) side of artificial intelligence is a new project from researchers at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Taking the form of a smart biometric mirror, their device uses facial-recognition technology to analyze users' faces, and then presents an assessment in the form of 14 different characteristics it has "learned" from what it's seen.