Digital Twins are a growing phenomena in business, for example a digital map of a city or building or car that is used for controlling or monitoring it. Those digital twins do not think…

A Digital Twin of yourself can be non-thinking – say a scan of your body used for diagnostics or to determine how a particular drug will interact with it. Or an avatar in the metaverse.

But a thinking twin, a cognitive digital twin of a human, can be immensely useful. It won’t be a physical representation but a mental one.

Just like Microsoft now lets corporations train an AI instance via corporate documents and communications, a twin of a human brain will need similar access. They cannot read our mind, so they will have to ride along with us and capture the inputs and outputs of our brain:

• the music we listen to
• the things we see
• conversations
• what we read and write
• the participants in our lives
• the work we do

And especially important, how we feel during all aspects of our days.

The obvious solution is AR glasses that record everything, tethered to a powerful phone. It will start out relatively simplistically, being used to say record where it sees items were last used to help you find them.

Smarter systems will capture everything and be able to mimic how you respond, and be able to replicate you.

The best will be when they can tune in to your emotions. I have no idea what tech will be required, but we already measure heart rate and so on with smart watches. AR glasses can read what our eyes are doing (pupil dilation, directions we look – which can be giveaways), and subtle changes in our voice. Those alone, combined, maybe with some basic initial training (the tech actually asks you how you felt), might be sufficient.

What I don’t anticipate is a clone of us being us and interacting with the world. But the uses could be wonderful, especially entertainment.

A digital twin of self could surf the web, watch movies, listen to music, and then make suggestions around what you might like. It can go shopping for you, and, again, make suggestions.

It could – having been sufficiently trained – go on dating sites and find the one.

We could also go a bit crazy and let our digital twins hang out with each other. They could have conversations in seconds that would take hours in the real world.

The twins of musicians could meet up and make music together.

And of course, not a new idea, we could leave a twin behind when we die.

But the key is training, and for that we need a device, and the tech company that does that will become immensely successful.