Digital Twin: Are Some Twins Evil?
A digital twin is a digital replica of both living and non-living entities and was originally created to enhance manufacturing processes. In its infancy, companies like Siemens were using this technology to digitally simulate and test the effectiveness of new processes before actually rolling them out on the manufacturing floor. Now the technology has evolved to the scale of an entire city and boasts more advanced capabilities for modeling and analysis.
A great use case for digital twin technology is the city of Singapore. Singapore has developed a live, data-rich model of the entire city that is being used for a variety of things like R&D work, long term planning, and virtual experiments. Singapore has been clear that the purpose of adopting this technology is to help officials make the best urban planning decisions and effectively communicate these decisions through virtual models, which is a very digestible medium.
Another use case of digital twin technology, that may be seen as controversial as we move towards more sustainable practices, is seen in the commercial space where Chevron is using the technology to reduce maintenance costs on equipment used in oil fields. The point being, we are entering a time of great uncertainty where both government agencies and commercial entities will be utilizing this technology to their benefit, whatever that may be, and policy governing the use of these technologies will be highly controversial.
