Monthly Archives: October 2014

Nicholas J. Webb - Futurist, Expert on Innovation
Nicholas J. Webb is a world-renowned business futurist and innovation thought leader. Webb is the author of The Innovation Playbook and The Digital Innovatio...

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In a recent and intriguing article atBusiness Insider, futurist John Smart makes a bold prediction in regard to near-future technology: Within five years, we could each have a digital twin an online version of ourselves that will make decisions for us in a world of information overload.

Of course, futurists are prone to bold predictions. Its literally part of the job. But the implications of Smarts ideas have an eerie ring of plausibility. The basic gist is that, as personal digital assistants like Siri and Cortana evolve, theyll learn our habits and preferences at the same time that were delegating more and more tasks to them.

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Gradually, our personal agent will morph into a kind of cyber-self able to navigate the online world in our stead, says Smart, founder of the Acceleration Studies Foundation. And theyll live, potentially, forever. When you and I die, our kids arent going to go to our tombstones, Smart told Business Insider. Theyre going to fire up our digital twins and talk to them.

The digital twin concept is based on emerging trends in a number of areas, including conversational interface (CI) technology and improved artificial intelligence systems that can crunch massive amounts of data quickly. Our digital twins will learn about our values and interests by being constantly plugged into our personal data stream emails and online activity and by increasing verbal interaction through the CI technology.

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The short-term examples Smart cites in the article digital twins doing our shopping or scheduling arent particularly compelling. Proponents of online agent technology have been conjecturing on this stuff since the 1990s. But the long-range implications are interesting. As our digital twins become more savvy, they could basically become both the depositories for, and the guardians of, all of our online information.

The future of personal control isnt control of data, Smart said. The future that we care about is control of an algorithmic interface of your identity.

via Business Insider

Credit: ThinkStock

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Your Digital Twin Could Be Making Your Decisions