Digital Twin – Understanding the Ghost in the Machine

“A digital twin is a digital replica of a living or non-living physical entity. Digital twin refers to a digital replica of potential and actual physical assets, processes, people, places, systems and devices that can be used for various purposes.” – Google

https://www.valicomcorp.com/blog/what-is-a-digital-twin

My predictions:

By 2026, a human digital twin avatar can be created of you by scanning you digital footprint (social media, texts) to be able to match your responses >95% of the time.

Your co-workers, friends and family will not be able to tell the difference of this communication >95% of the time. (see hourone.ai/ and soulmachines.com/)

By 2028 (when 6G launches), your co-workers, friends and family will prefer communicating with your digital twin avatar more than you. ??

By 2030, 1 Billion Digital Twin Avatars – ViPi-Connectome (Virtual ePi Connectome) that can match your responses >95% of the time

see the video: FUTURE FORUM by BMW Welt. Reclaim the Future: The Dawn of Synthetic Media. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sJBKEYDKe0&feature=emb_logo

For non-living physical entity digital twining: “In a recent article created by CISION PR Newswire, they provide the following roadmap for the future of digital twin technology:

• Up to 89% of all IoT Platforms will contain some form of Digital Twinning capability by 2025
• Digital twinning will become standard feature/functionality for IoT Application Enablement by 2027
• Over 92% of vendors recognize the need for IoT APIs and platform integration with digital twinning functionality for industrial verticals
• Nearly 36% of executives across a broad spectrum of industry verticals understand the benefits of digital twinning and 53% of them plan to incorporate within their operations by 2028”
• https://www.valicomcorp.com/blog/what-is-a-digital-twin

In the video, Quantum Simulation | You Can Program a Quantum Computer Too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD370qyxTyw It states:

“In the future, the sensible approach for quantum simulators as they develop and mature is to use them alongside these classical techniques in a kind of hybrid approach. A bit like how we already use CPUs and GPUs in our in our normal computers. 

The real potential for quantum simulators is to solve those problems where the approximate techniques fail this would be in problems where even a small error in calculating the energy levels of a molecule or an atom leads to big errors in say the rate of a chemical reaction.”

The comment about a hybrid approach to computing with CPUs and GPUs and Quantum Computers so solve problems got me thinking of all the different parts and systems of the human brain. Just like a hybrid approach to the human brain makes us who and what we are, a hybrid approach to computing will make a more interesting AI.

https://mayfieldclinic.com/pe-anatbrain.htm

https://www.news24.com/health24/mental-health/brain/anatomy-of-the-brain/Brain-areas-and-their-functions-20120721

For more information on how accurate we need to be to creating a digital twin or uploading, see the books:

• How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed Ray Kurzweil
• Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are by Sebastian Seung.

Also, see the video Can You Upload Your Mind & Live Forever? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b33NTAuF5E&t=1s

Srijeeth posted: “The new word phrase when our consciousness leaves our body will be: Rest in PC”

I am more in agreement with Ray Kurzweil that you only need to be 95% accurate in your responses. Do not need to scan at the neuron level to twin me.

What question would you ask your Digital Twin? Here are my thoughts:

Q1: How accurate does your Digital Twin in matching your response have to be to say it is a twin of you?

My answer. 95% on average with 99% of response not outside of a standard response I would give. (i.e. no response that I would say was totally wrong)

Note: my guess if I tracked all my response, there would be some differences on how I would respond to the same question at any point in time anyway.

Q2: When do you think technology will achieve this rating?

My answer 2026 – 2028 timeframe

Q3: What question would you ask your Digital Twin once it can achieve this level?

Possible questions to my digital twin

Q. What am I thinking now?

Q. What do you think about when you are not being asked questions? see Chinese Rooms

Q. “Do you have free will?” I would answer “I choose to believe so.”

Q. “Do you have a soul?” I would answer “I choose to believe so.”

But now if the AI scans this comment, it would answer this way for these last 2 questions as my digital twin.

Q4. What are the different interpretations of free will? Which one is the right one? Do you have a new interpretation of free will?

I do not have an answer right now for this last set of questions, would my digital twin know? What does it say if my digital twin knows more than me. ??

The challenge (if you are trying to match your human response) is how to dumb down your Digital Twin so it only knows what you know and not more than you do and not know everything the internet knows. Personally, I am fine that my digital twin will knowing more than me. 

Your digital twin would know what you did every day of your life (if that data was available to the AI). Would your digital twin remembers the events of your life better than you do? 

see: Recollections of the circumstances of how we first heard of the 2001 terrorist attacks may feel extraordinarily vivid and true, but they are flawed

“Our measure of accuracy is consistency with what people told us in the survey the week after the attack. From that first survey to the second survey a year later, the overall consistency of the details of how they learned of 9/11 was only 63 percent. At the third survey, three years after the attack, consistency was 57 percent. So people were only a little more than 50 percent right for a lot of the details.” scientificamerican com / article/ 911-memory-accuracy /

Would you digital twin be more interesting than you?

If a person could have an analysis of everything he said or wrote, I wonder what this would say about the level of Shannon entropy in his or her communications. Small talk has very little information. (Wikipedia, “Entropy in thermodynamic can be used to determine the energy not available for useful work in a thermodynamic process.”) Maybe the lack of information in a conversation has something to say about how hard we are working on the conversation. A boring conversation is deterministic and an interesting one is full of free will.

Q5. How much do you know? How much do you know that is correct? How should your digital twin match this? 

• “human master in a particular field has mastered about 100,000 chunks of knowledge.” Kurzweil
• ““encyclopedia of thought” is called CYC, … , the project to encode all the secrets of common sense into a single program. CYC’s goal is simple: master “100 million things, about the number a typical person knows about the world” Kaku

I am personally interested in the concept of Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity. See Byron Reese’s new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity. https://gigaom.com/2018/05/29/case-for-and-against-agi/

See this discussion on the Chinese Room and Conscious:

“When Weizenbaum saw that people were actually pouring out their hearts to ELIZA, even though they knew it was a computer program, he turned against it. He said that in effect, when the computer says “I understand,” it tells a lie. There is no “I” and there is no understanding.

His conclusion is not simply linguistic hairsplitting. The entire question of AGI hinges on this point of understandingsomething. To get at the heart of this argument, consider the thought experiment offered up in 1980 by the American philosopher John Searle. It is called the Chinese room argument. Here it is in broad form:

There is a giant room, sealed off, with one person in it. Let’s call him the Librarian. The Librarian doesn’t know any Chinese. However, the room is filled with thousands of books that allow him to look up any question in Chinese and produce an answer in Chinese.

Someone outside the room, a Chinese speaker, writes a question in Chinese and slides it under the door. The Librarian picks up the piece of paper and retrieves a volume we will call book 1. He finds the first symbol in book 1, and written next to that symbol is the instruction “Look up the next symbol in book 1138.” He looks up the next symbol in book 1138. Next to that symbol he is given the instruction to retrieve book 24,601, and look up the next symbol. This goes on and on. When he finally makes it to a final symbol on the piece of paper, the final book directs him to copy a series of symbols down. He copies the cryptic symbols and passes them under the door. The Chinese speaker outside picks up the paper and reads the answer to his question. He finds the answer to be clever, witty, profound, and insightful. In fact, it is positively brilliant.

Again, the Librarian does not speak any Chinese. He has no idea what the question was or what the answer said. He simply went from book to book as the books directed and copied what they directed him to copy. Now, here is the question: Does the Librarian understand Chinese?”

Brian Christian in the book, The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive wrote: "Grandmaster chess games are said to begin with a novelty, which is the first move of the game that exits the book [that part of chess that is memorized]. It could be the fifth, it could be the thirty-fifth. We think about a chess game as beginning with move one and ending with checkmate. But this is not the case . The game begins when it gets out of book, and it ends when it goes into book. Like electricity, it only sparks in the gaps. The opening book, in particular, is massive. The game may end before you get out, but it doesn’t begin until you do. Said differently, you may not get out alive; on the other hand, you’re not alive until you get out."

"Like most conversations and most chess games [and life itself], we all start off the same and we all end up the same, with a brief moment of difference in between.  Fertilization to fertilizer. Ashes to ashes . And we spark across the gap." 

In Robert Heinlein’s book “The moon is a Harsh Mistress” he writes: “I am not going to argue whether a machine can “really” be alive, “really” be self-aware. Is a virus self-aware? Nyet. How about oyster? I doubt it. A cat? Almost certainly. A human? Don’t know about you, tovarishch, but I am. Somewhere along evolutionary chain from macromolecule to human brain self-awareness crept in. Psychologists assert it happens automatically whenever a brain acquires certain very high number of associated paths. Can’t see it matters whether paths are protein or platinum. (“Soul”? Does a dog have a soul? How about cockroach?) So Mike [the computer] started with “free will” and acquired more as he was added to and as he learned—and don’t ask me to define “free will.” If comforts you to think of Mike as simply tossing random numbers in air and switching circuits to match, please do.”

A section from Robert Heinlein’s Moon is a harsh mistress gives insight to free will. Manuel who is the friend of Mike (the sentient computer) responded to Mike,

Manuel: “"No, no! Don't want it monitored, don't want it locked and traced. Can you call my home, connect me, and control circuit so that it can't be monitored, can't be locked, can't be traced--even if somebody has programmed just that? Can you do it so that they won't even know their program is bypassed?" 

“Mike hesitated. I suppose it was a question never asked and he had to trace a few thousand possibilities to see if his control of system permitted this novel program.

Mike: "Man, I can do that. I will." 

Authors note: Mike went against his programming because of his friendship with Manuel.

I think sentient, conscious and "free will" have a lot in common. Maybe some animals have some free will. Your pet dog or cat probably does to some degree. Robots do not - currently. 

When we are asked to do something that helps others but could harm us and we say "I can do that and I will", we are exercising our free will. 

Free will is like a muscle, exercised it or atrophy / entropy / destiny will take over.  A great example of free will is when a person who is raised in a racist society becomes friend to people of all race. This person rises to greatness “even if somebody has programmed [trained the person to do] just” the opposite”. This type of friendship is the height of free will.

I believe that part of one’s soul is “in the midst of all this muscle, sinew and appetite...something that is just Norfolk.”

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/free-determinism-trajectories-inevitable-part-1-doug-hohulin/

Telepresence, Telenetworking and Digital Twining

I am working on Digital Twins of Cell Sites and Smart Cities. Nokia has a Digital Twin as a Service https://www.nokia.com/networks/services/digital-design-and-deployment/. 

There are efforts on going in 6G development related to digital twins and telepresence that are very interesting.

“The technology is advancing to the point where it will no longer be an illusion of sharing a physical room. Instead, people will share one virtual room, according to Volker Ziegler, who works in a role of 6G leadership at Nokia Bell Labs. “Connecting new worlds would be in conjunction with digital worlds. It would start with this notion of mixed-reality telepresence,” said Ziegler, referring to the physical world and biological world, which would tie into the human experience. 6G is poised to connect them in ways previous generations have not been able to, he argued. “[With 6G] we’d be having more of a mixed-reality session, where we would be able to move about and engage more, probably with avatars in conjunction with high-resolution mapping,” Ziegler said, speaking as part of webinar hosted by 6G Flagship, a research group based out of the University of Oulu in Finland.”

https://www.6gworld.com/exclusives/the-art-of-teleconferencing-when-the-conference-room-is-an-ir-construct/

In 2020, we stopped going to conferences (and schools, work and the doctor) in person because of the risk of COVID-19 but we found we could be just as productive, save time and minimize our carbon footprint by not traveling and still get most of the benefits of attending the conferences remotely. 

We just need to optimize the new normal for telepresence, distance working, telemedicine, distance learning, telenetworking.

In 2021 and beyond with telepresence, we will continue to reduce traveling to save time and save the planet.

The distance learning is a great challenge. Students especially need socialization as they learn. Telepresence education optimized for distance learning (and not zoom calls) can help with this.

I have a teacher friend that said that her students are only learning 50% with zoom calls of what they could learn if they were in the classroom. 

But see the TALE2020 Keynote Speech 1 “Education Reimagined” Alvin Wang Graylin, China President, HTC of what the potential could be if education to be optimized with telepresence and VR.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pLSNfac5_4&t=2496s

(IEEE TALE 2020, the IEEE Education Society’s flagship Asia-Pacific conference on STEM education and educational technology)

How long will it take to transition from zoom education distance learning to the “Education Reimagined” Alvin Graylin outlines in his talk?

The lessons from the steam engine and electricity shows it takes a generation. We shall see if the risk to COVID and Climate in the 2020s changes the trajectory of this timeframe.

“But just as it took generations to improve the steam engine to the point that it could power the Industrial Revolution, it’s also taken time to refine our digital engines.

Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

“In the case of electricity, it took over thirty years to realize productivity gains – and interestingly, it was after retired managers were replaced by a new generation. I can’t help drawing an analogy to modern day. Digital technologies are deployed as isolated initiatives (versus combinatorial), they are layered onto broken processes, forced to work within the construct of antiquated operating models, and inhibited by a management approach that has not changed since the 1920’s. Will we have to wait for the next generation of managers to realize productivity gains?” https://frankdiana.net/2014/01/31/the-second-machine-age-and-business-evolution/

This article highlights the reduction of carbon emissions when a conference is done virtually

Green Conference: Reducing Carbon Emissions with a Virtual Conference - Don Balanzat 

A virtual conference is a green decision. Instead of 5K People traveling, staying in hotels, and using a convention center, Educators in VR prevented more than 7.5 million kg of carbon dioxide from being emitted into the atmosphere. https://educatorsinvr.com/2020/03/09/green-conference-reducing-carbon-emissions-with-a-virtual-conference/ 

Glad to see the UN doing this in 2026: Social VR 2021 UN Climate Change Conference COP26 - meet atop a snowy mountain island off Antarctica

Join us in social VR during the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26. Physically it is scheduled to be held in Glasgow, Scotland from 1 to 12 November 2021 under the presidency of the UK Government, with assistance from the Scottish Government. But, via the magic of online social VR, we will meet atop a snowy mountain island off Antarctica! In 2019 we had a successful and stimulating online meeting during COP25, floating above Santiago, Chile, within view of the snow Andes. This conference is to be the first "global stocktake" outlined in the Paris Agreement. What has been our collective progress over the past five years to reduce emissions, build resilience to climate change, and align financial support for climate action? https://www.ukcop26.org 

Information & the Dunning–Kruger effect 

On Top of Mount Stupid - Entire organizations also suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect and are stuck in transformation at the peak of Mount Stupid. Marcus Raitner

https://marcusraitner.medium.com/on-top-of-mount-stupid-9d38d1569225

The Dun-ning-Kruger effect leads to all sorts of heat-ed dis-cus-sions in social media, because in the age of Google every-one can acquire a lit-tle basic knowl-edge and thus quick-ly con-sid-er them-selves very com-pe-tent. How-ev-er, a deep and last-ing under-stand-ing of a top-ic and real exper-tise can only be achieved when you leave the peak of “Mount Stu-pid” behind. The first step towards this is the real-iza-tion of not-know-ing, as attrib-uted to Socrates: “I know that I do not know!” Quite delib-er-ate-ly, “not” instead of “noth-ing” is writ-ten here, which fits bet-ter the orig-i-nal mean-ing. For Socrates, the recog-ni-tion of the lim-its of his own knowl-edge means a piece of wis-dom: “Although I do not sup-pose that either of us knows any-thing real-ly beau-ti-ful and good, I am bet-ter off than he is — for he knows noth-ing, and thinks that he knows. I nei-ther know nor think that I know.” (Pla-to: Apol-o-gy of Socrates). Wis-dom does not begin with the first bits of under-stand-ing, but only with the descent from the peak of Mount Stu-pid into the val-ley of despair.”

At a science meeting, the speaker asked before he started, how much do you know about this topic last month on a 10 scale. Most people were giving answers in the 5-8 scale. The speaker then said he was at a level 2. 

In the future, when asked this type of question, I will respond my Dunning–Kruger rating is 0.5

A sophomore college level rating gives 7 when he should be giving the 0.5 – the “wise fool” rating. 

A good question to the group is what topic do know the most of? and what is your Dunning–Kruger level of that topic?  

Only if you know a topic well, do you know how much you do not know.

If the topic is cellular communication, I would give myself a Dunning–Kruger rating of 6. Even at 6, I am probably giving myself a higher level than I should after 32 years in the industry.  I am higher is some specific sub areas of cellular communication but lower in others.

“All the fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no closer to the answer to the question: What are light quanta? Of course today every rascal thinks he knows the answer, but he is deluding himself.” - Albert Einstein

Author’s note: We now know a photon is an excitation in a quantum field but I am deluding myself if I think I really understand this. I am on the Top of Mount Stupid when it comes to quantum mechanics. I know just enough to be dangerous. 

There is a Danger of Repeating What You Read without Understanding

“The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.” - Dalí

What I am good at is finding information on a topic quickly and vetting that information. 

“A little learning is a dangerous thing;

drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:

there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

and drinking largely sobers us again.” 

Alexander Pope - An Essay on Criticism, 1709

https://www.richmond-news.com/opinion/columnists/column-a-little-learning-is-a-dangerous-thing-more-is-better-1.1331349#sthash.7OG1x1Pc.dpuf

When I give talks to students (from 4th grade to college) on the future of technology, I stress the importance to not Lose your Humanity with Technology

I tell the students if they Forget everything else from my talk:

In the Future, when you

• Transport on your first VR trip to a new country or place
• and learn something you are interested in and have a good time doing it,
• Ride in your first self-driving vehicle,
• Fly in your first flying car (EVTOL),
• Blast-off on your first trip to space

Remember:

• In a World Where Answers Are Available Instantaneously, Knowing “What Questions to Ask” is critical, Be a lifelong learner to know how to ask good questions
• Find & Collaborate with People Who Share Your Interests & Augment Your Natural Intelligence with the Tools of Technology
• Do not to Lose your Humanity with Technology – Search and Find Wisdom & Purpose & Human Relationships
• Stay Safe - Put the Cell Phone Down & Look both ways before crossing the street!

The 2020s will be an exciting time to be alive and maybe twinned. Something to discuss with my digital twin in about 8 years.