there's a trending meme concerning the use of digital twins, which is reminiscent of the old DARPA Total Information Awareness fantasy - in that world, every physical thing (and being) is fully instrumented and telemetry is sent/gathered by the cyber-panopticon (quite likely in the sky, like some early James Bond villain).
The problem with the vision is that it gains you nothing and costs you the earth (almost literally in terms of resource use, e.g. energy in communications, storage and computation).
The digital twin metaphor substitutes (or clones) the physical world with a digital replica.
Aside from the basic resource costs, there are also interesting challenges such as making sure the digital replica actually is a clone, and hasn't drifted out-of-synch with the physical sister - much as Hari Seldon did in second foundation recorded holograph appearances in Asimov's great original trilogy, when his much vaunted psychohistory prediction of the future had diverged from reality due to the Mule's random mutation's intervention. And exactly as the Dr Who DVD blipverts (easter eggs) don't diverge at all in the fabulous Blink episode.
Aside from that, the reason it is pointless (as well as infeasible) is that it doesn't do what anyone wants - so you have a digital copy of everything - it doesn't abstract one whit - it doesn't let you introspect, it isn't interpretable or intelligable. One could subject it to some massive scale bayesian model inference, I suppose - but why? we have science - we have models of how physical (and social and biological) stuff works - we need only record instances and divergence from the model.
The problem with the vision is that it gains you nothing and costs you the earth (almost literally in terms of resource use, e.g. energy in communications, storage and computation).
The digital twin metaphor substitutes (or clones) the physical world with a digital replica.
Aside from the basic resource costs, there are also interesting challenges such as making sure the digital replica actually is a clone, and hasn't drifted out-of-synch with the physical sister - much as Hari Seldon did in second foundation recorded holograph appearances in Asimov's great original trilogy, when his much vaunted psychohistory prediction of the future had diverged from reality due to the Mule's random mutation's intervention. And exactly as the Dr Who DVD blipverts (easter eggs) don't diverge at all in the fabulous Blink episode.
Aside from that, the reason it is pointless (as well as infeasible) is that it doesn't do what anyone wants - so you have a digital copy of everything - it doesn't abstract one whit - it doesn't let you introspect, it isn't interpretable or intelligable. One could subject it to some massive scale bayesian model inference, I suppose - but why? we have science - we have models of how physical (and social and biological) stuff works - we need only record instances and divergence from the model.
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