Chatterbox #348 – Digital Twins

Now, Anna, you are the one who suggested this topic, and I think it's a great one, but I'm kinda curious, what struck you about this article and about this topic that made you suggest it for a Chatterbox discussion here?

I actually had to do a double take when I first read this article.

If you are in the world of perhaps engineering or architecture, I thought digital twin, when they were talking about it, is the process of replicating a building or a structure in a digital way.

That's a very common thing that people are talking about in the engineering construction sector.

So I thought, "Oh, we're talking about that." I clicked on the article, and a- as I was reading through it, I was like, oh my goodness.

It blew me away because I had no idea that people were working on this.

And essentially, what the article talks about is these people in companies that are building a literal digital twin of themselves so that people can talk to the digital twin as if it's them.

Their team can speak to them as if it's them.

And I, I guess it makes logical sense that we would go in that direction.

I just thought, but-Wow.

It kind of stunned me a little bit because I thought, "Okay, what, what's next?" Like, if you have a digital twin, what's to stop a company just taking all your knowledge and all your expertise and just being like, "Cheers.

Thanks very much.

I'll take that digital twin, but we don't really need you anymore"? I just thought this could be a topic that's interesting for a lot of people out there who are working in companies, and I'm just really interested to see and hear your thoughts about it, Andrew, and also everyone that's listening to the podcast as well.

So yeah, it just struck me as something kind of nuts, to be honest.

[laughs]

[laughs] It is pretty wild that we can almost clone ourselves now, and we could have a digital representation of ourself that lives on the computer, and it's a digital version, and then we can use AI agents to control that digital persona.

So it, it, you know, it's not us doing the actions.

It's almost like we're a puppet, and the AI is controlling us, but our mannerisms are gonna be similar.

The way that we write and, and talk, all of this is gonna be represented digitally in a way that's very similar to our real selves.

And yeah, I, I was thinking about it from a variety of different angles, and I think, depending on your perspective, it could be good or bad.

And I was thinking about it from the perspective, uh, of an employee, from the perspective of an employer, and from the perspective of an entrepreneur.

So these three Es: employee, employer, and entrepreneur.

And I think maybe let's start with entrepreneur because from the entrepreneurial perspective, this makes a lot of sense.

And actually, it could be very valuable.

It could be an awesome tool because if you're a freelancer, if you're doing your own work, if you're working for yourself, if you have your own business, then often you're, like, really stressed.