Digital Twins: Potentials, Ethical Issues, and Limitations
Abstract
After Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI), the subject of Digital Twins has emerged as another promising technology, advocated, built, and sold by various IT companies. The approach aims to produce highly realistic models of real systems. In the case of dynamically changing systems, such digital twins would have a life, i.e. they would change their behaviour over time and, in perspective, take decisions like their real counterparts \textemdash so the vision. In contrast to animated avatars, however, which only imitate the behaviour of real systems, like deep fakes, digital twins aim to be accurate "digital copies", i.e. "duplicates" of reality, which may interact with reality and with their physical counterparts. This chapter explores, what are possible applications and implications, limitations, and threats.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2208.04289,
title = {Digital Twins: Potentials, Ethical Issues, and Limitations},
author = {Dirk Helbing and Javier Argota Sánchez-Vaquerizo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.04289},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
22 pages, in Andrej Zwitter and Oskar Gstrein, Handbook on the Politics and Governance of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, Edward Elgar [forthcoming] (Handbooks in Political Science series)