Do you know your Digital Twin?
It has been an amazing journey of innovation meets personality over the last 20 years where we have seen tremendous advances in the world of information technology. What once was the paper medical record in the doctors office that contained detailed health information under lock and key only in the physicians office, is now electronically imbedded in some ambiguous cloud box in the internet. With ever growing vast sums of information about you being accumulated with each visit to a hospital or office visit or lab test that is now attached to your identification. In a snap shot most of everything about your mind and body is computed and stored. This is what I like to call your inner digital twin.
Now enter social media with cookies and gps tracking all your shopping, eating and traveling and personal interests and habits. Once again this compilation of data creates another part of your digital twin. We continue to post our inner fantasies that become realities for common interest, perhaps adulation, or even sharing of knowledge. Many times ” innocent” and yet smart tracking systems devised to” help” us get more access to shopping, eatery or other options that work faster, are adopted in the name of convenience.
Our cars, our phones, or kitchen accessories like fridges and coffee makers, learn our choices very carefully. Gadgets like Fitbits, Iwatch, running apps and devices, automatic BP machines and countless others that continue to assimilate the most personal of information about our pulse, oxygen use, sleeping habits, respiratory status, health conditioning, gait, walking or running styles, and numerous other parameters. These together are the building blocks of our digital twin. In the virtual world with new gaming technology we can virtually play, communicate and compete with others without ever leaving the comfort of our own home.
With the advent of new biometric recognition such as fingerprint, retinal scan, personal key codes, and facial recognition algorithms we surrender every part of our most intimate uniqueness and unload it to the digital twin that is waiting to be born. Unknowingly it has already been birthed as artificial intelligence such as the new smartphones that can tell what mood you are in when you look at the screen. In doing so, a host of choices can be presented to you based on prior data of who you are mentally, physically, spiritually and so on. The smart phones are your supercomputers to access the entire world, much more than ever being a real phone. Texting, emailing, use of chat apps are the norm of instant communication instead of picking up the phone and talking to another human. Are you even sure that you are communicating with another human when you text or are you getting their digital twin?
Have you noticed like I have that you are constantly being bombarded by the same advertisements of sellable items that you may have expressed a fleeting interest at one point yet now it is being hinted at you constantly in the side columns of your email, pandora, web browsing screens? I wonder how much of coercion my Digital twin is applying on me to bend to its will?
This is the age that we live in, with both benefits and drawbacks of all that has been created. The big questions that really need to be asked are who controls the digital twin? Do you? or do the profiteering marketeers ? Or are you controlled by your digital twin and are unaware that most things in your life are being dictated by your twin in the name of convenience?
Does your digital twin love you?
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I love you
