Cracker Barrel infamously tried changing their homey friendly warm and folksy logo to a stripped down dull almost monotone cool version. To remain “current”. They also, reports say, redid the insides of restaurants to emulate modern real estate Soviet-inspired ideas of stripping all detail and turning everything monotonous shades of suicide-inducing gray. They thought this would increase business.
Scientists, grown weary with their dull old ways, and wanting to stay hip—do they still say hip?—decided to redesign their logo, too, as it were. Only they didn’t make the same mistake Crack Barrel did. Instead of hiring some ridiculously over-priced longhoused consulting firm, they asked computer scientists to do the redesign.
Brilliant!
Computer scientists are the firm that brought us neural nets, machine learning, genetic algorithms, and, yes, artificial intelligence, which they cleverly capitalized as “AI”. What’s fantastic is all these evocative names represent the same thing! Models (basically non-linear regressions with some hard coded rules thrown in).
Used to be computer guys would trot out a new name only after they sensed the old one had lost its shine. But “AI” has not. The bubble daily swells. It still tickles imaginations. Which means computer guys hit upon a real innovation: they invented a new name while the current one still shines.
Digital Twin.
What is a Digital Twin? It is, like every new name invented by computer scientists, a model. Only now AI “creates” or “builds” the model. In other words, a Digital Twin is a model of a model.
Where might we find Digital Twins? Here’s some happy-talk hype examples.
Outperform your competition with a comprehensive Digital Twin
Leverage the comprehensive Digital Twin to design, simulate, and optimize products, machines, production, and entire plants in the digital world before taking action in the real world. This helps manufacturers to tackle industry’s biggest challenges: mastering complexity, speeding up processes, and improving sustainability overall.
IBM:
What is a digital twin?
A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical object or system that uses real-time data to accurately reflect its real-world counterpart’s behavior, performance and conditions.
What is digital-twin technology?
A digital twin is a digital replica of a physical object, person, system, or process, contextualized in a digital version of its environment. Digital twins can help many kinds of organizations simulate real situations and their outcomes, ultimately allowing them to make better decisions.
In other words, models. But how tediously banal is models? Try and sell a model. IBM: “Let us build a model of your system, which might provide useful predictions.” Doesn’t sing. Doesn’t entice. Doesn’t scream premium price. Try this instead: “Be the first to adopt our AI-designed Digital Twin which gives AI insights.” Now you can charge real money.
Digital Twin reeks of excitement. So much so, you just know academics will be getting in on it.
And they are, with all the grim gusto of that publish-or-perish breed.
Almost two full seconds of searching turned up this peer-reviewed gem: “Digital twins for trans people in healthcare: queer, phenomenological and bioethical considerations” by Jose Luis Guerrero Quinones and Anna Puzio in BMJ Medical Ethics.
A model of the workings of the bodies doctors already had, most of it stored in their minds. But now they can offload that burden to computers, which they can pretend Digital Twins are exactly like real bodies. It’s AI! So they can simulate giving the Digital Twin an mRNA shot, see what happens, then report that what happened to the Digital Twin will happen to the real person. Because AI.
Doctors won’t be the first to forget that all models only say what they are told to say, and Digital Twins are models. That’s not the real story here, as you might have guessed from the paper’s title. The real concern to these academics is what the presence of the Digital Twin will do to the fragile minds of the oriented community (those who believe they have a “sexual orientation”).
From the Abstract (my paragraphifications):
Healthcare is one of the domains in which artificial intelligence (AI) is already having a major impact. Of interest is the idea of the digital twin (DT), an AI-powered technology that generates a real-time representation of the patient’s body, offering the possibility of more personalised care.
Our main thesis in this paper is that the DT does not merely represent the patient’s body but produces a specific body.
We argue, from a philosophical perspective and an ethical-phenomenological approach, that the virtual body created by the DT has a major impact on one’s self-understanding, having consequences for gender expression and identification, and for health. This has deep implications for people who do not conform to gender normativity, for example, trans individuals. We advocate that, with thoughtful development, DT technology can and should be empowering, contributing to better addressing the diversity of bodies and facilitating trans people’s experience in healthcare contexts.
There is nothing to say about this except that to suggest models have “sexual orientations” is something only an academic would propose.
Here are the various ways to support this work:
- Subscribe at Substack (paid or free)
- Cash App: $WilliamMBriggs
- Zelle: use email: matt@wmbriggs.com
- Buy me a coffee
- Paypal
- Other credit card subscription or single donations
- Hire me
- Subscribe at YouTube
- PASS POSTS ON TO OTHERS
Discover more from William M. Briggs
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
As long as we’re on the topic of renaming things, I have to point out one example that really annoys me. We have two perfectly fine words to describe moving and carrying objects: load and unload. Somewhere, someone decided that they should be replaced with onload and offload. These two words should be banned – they just add more letters to the original words without conveying any additional meaning.
An alternete reality (in which New Coke is a brilliant success)
“Trans” is a mind-virus trans-mitted by rampant Leftist propaganda. And homosexual grooming.
Some are born. Many more are made.
“AI-powered technology” That sounds even better than a digital twin. “AI-Powered” is to “technology” what the supercharger is to an internal combustion engine. MOAR POWA!!!
Thank you for explaining the DTs. The term crept into civil engineering over the years and I interpreted it in the biological sense, two identical entities or two fraternal entities, but at least two entities that were sort of the same and maybe sentient. Here is an example of the latest:
https://www.asce.org/publications-and-news/civil-engineering-source/article/2025/05/15/new-asce-book-explores-the-future-of-digital-twins-in-construction
Down in the rabbit hole, an example with where you flush to:
https://www.asce.org/publications-and-news/civil-engineering-source/article/2026/01/13/smart-sewer-technologies-are-on-the-rise-new-study-helps-utilities-adapt
“A full smart sewer integration is a system composed of three stages,” he said. “The first – what we call ‘turning on the lights’ – uses sensors to understand what is happening across the network in real time. In the second stage, a digital twin is combined with forecasting tools to predict how the system will perform in the near future. The third stage applies real-time optimization algorithms to identify the best operational strategy for the assets on the ground.”
With your clarification of DTs, I can now appreciate the clean one of the pair in my office, responding to my keyboard inputs, knowing that the sewage and rainfall inputs are products of your specialty, nonlinear interpolation of log-transformed data projected to a century or more. Being retired, I will leave it to others to inquire how the dirty one of the pair responds to pigging or balling a clog.
The software company I worked for used “Digital Twin” in its marketing at least 15 years ago.
When the Digital Twin is tasked to prophesy the effect of an mRNA shot on a patient, given the leftist predisposition of the great majority of those who design and program such things, the answer won’t be difficult to predict.
DTs? I think that condition is generally managed with benzodiazepines…no?
So instead of any actual fieldwork and gathering physical materials and samples, will the scientists now be using digital replicas of reality that they will then feed into the digital twin?
Hopefully one day the scientists themselves will be replaced by AI giving itself it’s own artificial work to do.
I should make a movie, a remake of Frankenstein, instead Dr. Frankenstein is an AI who gets this illegal migrant chap, Igor, to gather human parts, which he procures from liberal white women walking where they shouldn’t be late at night which the AI will then reanimate into the perfect bride for Igor so that he will cease attacking random white women therefore providing a solution asked for by the British government to help ease the statistics.
The twist is that there never was an Igor, not any body parts. It was all digital, in a vacuum. And the British government’s statistical sleight of hand is exposed as the artificiality that it is, and the opposition pat’s itself proudly on the back as the very real assaults continue unabated as nothing has changed.