Meet your digital twin

The intelligence of your phone is beyond what you hold in your hand, your phone is just the surface of something much larger, and closer to you – Get ready to meet your digital twin… Your twin who is a smarter than you, faster, more connected and know you better, version of yourself

Text and drawing by Frits Ahlefeldt, Hiking.org

The problem when everything is connected and competing about your attention

Today Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – and a lot of other digital social media creatures monitor us from our toasters, from street-cams, satellites, smart watches, phones, and cars. These digital systems try hard to calculate what our preferences are, what we will do next and what we want to stay clear of.  And they are all getting better and better at knowing us.

But when all these systems each compete to know us better and all insist to send us their ideas and best recommendations, it adds up… And we get too many notifications, updates, birthday reminders from competing systems… just too much info.

What these digital systems all aim at is actually not you, but a digital profile of you, a profile that is as close as it can get to be you…just slightly better – they aim at the one you want to be.

Your digital twin

Today this digital profile of you is about to come alive, gain self-consciousness and move from being a huge, passive collection of data about you, to become an active, interacting, choice-making and living creature, that is more at home in the digital realm than you are. A creature that can pass as you, like the right things for you and write those funny comments you always tried to. A slightly smarter, funnier, more attractive digital version of you – meet your digital twin

We will all get one, and it will be very close connected to each of  us.  Actually it looks like it will be so well connected to us that it will know us better than we know ourselves… So why not listen to it and make it your best friend?

A day with your digital twin

Take a classic situation, on your holiday you might think you dare to jump from the highest cliff and into the ocean, to impress the bio-girls… And as you get up from the beach, brush of the sand from your elbows and start to climb the stairs up and up, your digital twin will be with you all the way, knowing you better, it has calculated the risk for this, even days before you start climbing, it will figure out a good excuse for you to step down, or a way to help you prepare for making it – depending on how it estimates your chances of making a successful and impressive jump… Because it needs you to make it, just as much as you do.

And in the evening, at the bar you feel great after your daring jump, and wave the waiter for yet another drink, You digital twin will know exactly how much you have been drinking so far and how much alcohol is in your blood, and it will, like a good twin, disconnect mobile pay and your rental car, and call a cap to get you well back to the hotel.  In the morning you won’t even remember how you got home, just happily swiping through likes from all your new, mostly human friends.

Those GPS apps was just the beginning

Can you remember in the old days, when you both had to drive your car and look at strangely folded, gigantic paper maps, at the same time? Today you just need to say “Hi Siri” or something like that  to your phone and then tell it where you want to go, after a few seconds there will be a kind, slightly metallic sounding woman, calculating your position and telling you to “go straight – then turn right at the next intersection”…  tomorrow we will all be many miles past that intersection.

your car won’t talk to you… It will talk to your digital twin

There has been a lot of fuzz about intelligent cars, self-driving cars and cars that would know to drive better than any human. Most likely they are just around the corner, and you will be able to hold a conversation with them… But would you really want to spend your precious time here on Earth talking to a four wheeled steel machine? Wouldn’t it be better if someone who’s more fluent in the latest computer-language could do the conversation with your Tesla for you?

Your digital twin will get the bigger (digital) picture

Your digital twin will drive your car, and connect to your friends, drone, phone, bio-meter, mind, home and family,  like if it was you.

Your twin will help you navigate life between your past and your future, leaving you in the moment, making sure you not only get where you want to go, but it will open the sunroof of your car and take the scenic road along the ocean, because the sea makes you feel alive.

Then It will turn on your favorite Beachboys song, letting you daydream while you watch the waves, from the passenger seat of your life…

… Because it is your digital twin’s life too.

See more of my drawings about technology here: Technology drawings on Hiking.org