Who or what is this “digital twin”? Does it really exist? Where does it come from? What do I get out of it?
Digital twins are used to represent real things digitally. These things can be machines, buildings, products, but also people. Typically, simulations can be carried out very well on these digital representations because their parameters can be changed easily and quickly, e.g. before machines, buildings or products are built in the real world. This method is often used in industry to optimize the design and manufacturing process.
But…. There are also digital twins for humans. In fact, for a very long time and many of them. Each of us leaves digital “footprints” as soon as we move around in the digital world. If these “footprints” are collected and put into context, the providers of our digital environments can also build a digital twin of us. This starts with the purchase history of an online store, the login times on social media, the selected avatars in VR/AR or even your browser history. Anyone who has access to this information can create a digital image.
Even if each of the providers only knows part of the information visible to them, it is still possible to draw conclusions/simulations about the real person. The prediction of shopping behavior or the display of certain advertising on social media are classic examples. Because there is a huge business model behind this, there have always been efforts to combine this data into as complete a user profile as possible – into as complete a digital twin as possible.
Digital twins can provide extremely accurate predictions by constantly comparing them with reality and can also be used very well for historical analyses thanks to the permanent storage of a large amount of data. In industry – excellent, for personal use – to be used with caution.
Soon there will be AI chatbots (the first of which already exist) that use information from your digital twin, know what you buy, have access to your social media accounts and much more. You can then interact with your digital twin, which will remember everything and recommend what you can do next or how to deal with certain situations.
Let’s see what he finds out about us…
P.S.: as always, this article is written without AI. However, I used Midjourney for the visualization of “my” digital twin. Prompt: Profile picture + a cartoon of a man in the style of pixar
