Because the twin is not a copy: On the politics of digital twins

Abstract

This essay explores the changing form of the digital twin as a political technology in the age of deep learning and generative artificial intelligence (AI). It situates the digital twin as a distinctive contemporary form of simulation and examines how it is making up people, things, scenes and their interactions in novel ways: the drawing in of unstructured datastreams and their experimental recombining and modification. Although the digital twin is often represented as a digital copy or replica of the physical world, it actually departs radically from a mimetic copy; advancing a mode of twinning that classifies, extracts and divides. The essay addresses digital twinning as an emerging form of knowledge and action in the world. It proposes three distinctive logics of the contemporary politics of digital twins: intervention, prediction and action. Each of these aspects is discussed through the situated digital twin domains of the factory, the clinic and the battlefield.