Scientists Invent New Name For Models: Digital Twins

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.

Siemens:

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.

McKinsey:

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.

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