John
Smart, a futurist and founder of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, said that
advances in computer science will soon allow computer-based versions of
ourselves (our digital twins) to act as our personal agents — automatically
filling out forms or scheduling appointments.
This may have sounded almost unbelievable 10 years ago. However, nowadays we have many applications on our phone which may know us
better than our parents. Tripadvisor knows which kind of restaurant you love
most, Spotify knows which songs you frequently listen to, Google Maps knows where
you have been in the city and Dictionary knows what words you don’t understand.
These personal habits and interests are precisely and completely recorded by
the system and it’s not an issue to collect all those data and create a digital
model which thinks like how you think, acts like how you act. One day,
these digital twins could even hold conversations and have faces that mimic
your emotion.
"They will
become increasingly like us and extensions of us", Smart said.
For
digital twin technology to reach its full potential, there needs to
be better conversational interfaces and semantic maps.
The next step is let your cyber-selves
to start making decisions for you. But how? In our past article we mentioned that Digital
Twins has started being applied in the healthcare area which means we can have your "digital organs" and monitor them in real-time. So what will happen when you
are at work, and your father who stays at home alone suddenly has a heart
attack? He can’t get up to call either you or the hospital, but his cyber-self can do
everything for him. When his digital twin detects the unusual situation, and
based on the previous data it has collected, it will realize now it’s time to
call an ambulance from the most recent hospital and to call you then, and it
will tell doctors which medicines has your father used before. This certainly,
will avoid many potential risks and sometimes even can predict danger in
advance.
It is very clear that there are plenty of advantages of your digital twin, however the uncertain status of online privacy
is already bothering the general public. People criticize companies like Google and
Amazon that only pull their information from what's available. But with digital
twins, we'll have to give full permission for companies to access our online
identities to optimize our use of the technology.
"You know, I'd like to have control of my healthcare or
financial information in my own little internet locker" Smart admits. But thinking like this is old-fashioned. You can not accomplish much
by having control of your own data.
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Thanks for reading!
We hope to see you back again soon!
Digino