First the good news. Everyone has a doppelganger somewhere in this world. Canadian François Brunelle has been photographing people together who look exactly alike since 1999 without being family. His project I’m Not a Look-Alike continues to grow, especially now that we can easily find our own doppelganger online through facial recognition software.
The search isn’t always flattering, though. When I put my unflattering photo in such software, it turns out to see me as a cross between Winston Churchill and Luis Buñuel. sigh. Nevertheless, I would have enjoyed taking a picture with the gentlemen, had they not been dead for fifty years.
Now for the bad news. In recent years there has been a dire race in the production of ‘digital twins’. A digital twin is made of every phenomenon in the physical world: a realistic digital copy that is connected in real time with the original. You make a digital twin of a tomato plant, of a city or of the climate – and then the twins show how the tomato, city or climate is doing at that moment. A digital twin is a model, a simulation, an analysis tool.
And, yes, of course we will also make a digital twin of ourselves. “Why You Might Have a Thinking Digital Twin in 10 Years” writes the BBC technology reporter† The unique mission of the digital copy is to provide feedback to the original, the reporter writes, and thus optimize and grow the original plant or human. For employers, a digital twin of their employees is therefore very, how do you say that neatly, oh yes, interesting.
The BBC has an expert say that digital twin ownership will become “one of the defining aspects of the coming metaverse era.” And if you’ve been paying attention, reading along, you’ll know that companies at conventions do indeed come out loud to explain how lucrative it is for Mark Zuckerberg’s capitalist empire to create digital twins as the cornerstone of the industrial metaverse.
At this point I tend to become activist and play up. But there’s already enough crank in the world, and since I’m committed to always being reasonable, I’m going to use my anti-capitalist rant in strictly neutral terms. It is absurd, I say, that with our economic growth we have helped the living environment to the philistines and that we are still going to boost all production and consumption worldwide with the use of digital twins.
If you read about digital twins, you will read the usual commercial blabla everywhere. “Digital twins as the engine for Industry 4.0,” the tech company exults. “Digital twins provide a hundredfold improvement in the speed of bringing new projects to market,” the lobby club applauds. And rest assured, they all sing, the development is indeed aimed at economic growth, but then, on a word of honour, purely sustainable and in Africa†
The whole twin story isn’t just science-philosophical nonsense: it’s ideology. There is no such thing as a digital twin. You can make a model, for example of a cat, but such a model will always remain a simplification and it is good to realize that. If you want to optimize the original cat from the digital image, with real-time feedback, you will have to put assumptions and goals in the model. What do you have in mind with that cat? What do you want her to do?
That is also the case for the twin that the European Commission is making of the whole earth today† It also contains goals and assumptions. The digital twin is a manipulation technique,’steering technique‘, write researchers Korenhof, Blok and Kloppenburg of Wageningen University. And in all reasonableness I would prefer to hit everyone hard with their article ‘Steering Representations—Towards a Critical Understanding of Digital Twins†† I’d like to rub your nose through it all.
The twin is not hyper-realistic, not neutral, the authors write, it is incomplete and embedded in techno-industrial thinking. If the European Commission wants to save the climate with such twins, it will have to study the underlying goals and assumptions carefully, otherwise it will irrevocably make the wrong policy decisions.
Yes, the digital twin is big business. But in 2022, the newspaper-reading caste will not have to wonder how you can get rich quickly with it, they will finally have to ask themselves what is sensible and wise.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of June 25, 2022