Oy gevalt, one of almost any of us is enough. But there’s a chance we could eventually have a digital doppelganger that guides our behavior the way search engines predict what we seek. The Other could use our previously stated “likes” and information we may not have culled on our own. Seems useful, and, perhaps, made for mayhem. It’s a nudge, it’s a shove. The opening of John Smart’s “The Cybertwin: Your Emerging Digital Self“:

Once we have reasonably good conversational interfaces and semantic maps, circa 2015-2020 in my guesstimation, a major new developments we can expect at the same time are ‘CyberTwins’ (called ‘Twins’ hereafter), intelligent assistants, agents, avatars, butlers, and ‘techretarys’ that will use these interfaces and maps to construct crude models of their user’s preferences and values. Twins will use as input user writings and archived email, realtime wearable smartphones (lifelogs), and verbal feedback, to allow increasingly intelligent and productive guidance of the user’s purchases, learning, communication, feedback, and even voting activities, offloading a lot of the information overload and cognitive overhead of managing modern society from biohumans to their twin. As I see it, the intelligence amplification that results from our having twins will begin a major revolution in protecting and furthering the user’s interests, leading us to a much more democratic society.

Twins will start out primitive, but they will quickly get good at filtering digital information streams for the user, answering simple questions, managing simple productivity tasks, and offering simple advice. Many people, walking in a supermarket or driving on the street, will reach past one brand of product, or drive past one type of store to another, guided there verbally or visually by their twin, who is continually using public data, user history, and algorithms to seek a better statistical match with their expressed values and preferences.•