Giving Birth to Digital Twins

Imagine trying to repair a car that’s in Sydney – when you’re in Melbourne. Or, worse still repairing a spaceship from earth when it’s 400,000 km away on the dark side of the moon. This is the problem NASA faced 50 years ago with Apollo 13. They fixed it way back then with ‘Mirror Systems’ of the craft they had on earth. In doing so, they unwittingly gave birth to The Digital Twin.

Digital twins will be one of the most important economic technologies of the coming decade.  They’ll affect every single industry and in the long run, the technology will become part of our personal lives too.

Put simply, a digital twin is a virtual replica of any physical thing or process. While the concept is not new, only recently has the implementation been possible and economical, through the emergence of the Internet of Things and advancements in AR and VR . This pairing of the virtual and physical worlds allows analysis of data and monitoring of systems to head off problems before they even occur, prevent downtime, develop new opportunities and even plan for the future by using simulations. But it gets even better than that.

Imagine a large industrial machine for which a digital twin has been developed. Via the twin, anything that goes wrong with physical version will immediately translate back to the virtual version. If any repairs, maintenance or changes are made  to the physical version – the digital twin automatically gets updated. Likewise, eventually we’ll be able to change the physical version without actually touching it – it will all be done via the digital twin. Stop – think about your industry and just imagine the possibilities…they’re almost endless. Shelves in stores, warehouses transport systems, machinery, factories, buildings, supply chains, rail, aviation and eventually, even you.

Yes, you’ll eventually have a digital twin. Advanced cameras, sensors, ultrasound and in-home MRI systems will be inside our smart homes, married up with self quantifying wearables and in body nano-sensors. These will create a a live digital twin of our body which will monitor our well being and know we’re sick long before symptoms arrive, enabling better management of our health and increase longevity of our most important asset – ourselves. It’s gonna get radical. It’s another reason privacy really matters now, while it’s still just sharing photos of coffee!

We can expect every industry over the next decade to start building out the digital twins of everything they own, make, sell do and manage. Every company worth its salt needs to be developing a digital twins – and those who get really good at it – can end up potentially controlling a platform and maybe even being a supplier to their competitors.

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If you haven’t already – please check out the latest Future Sandwich Podcast on the Future of Fashion – it’s rad.

The future of stealing music and everything else

Before technology allowed for recorded music, it was a pretty difficult thing to steal. You’d listen to the medieval minstral and maybe sing it to yourself after they’d left town. Heck, I’m sure that’s what they wanted. In those days, money only happened when they we’re ‘in the room.’ But then music changed…. it was something you could listen to when the musician wasn’t present.

When we entered the magnetic tape era, it become relatively easy to copy or ‘steal’ music for the first time. When I was a teenager there were a few ways of making copies of music:

Tape it off the radio: Wait patiently during the American Top 40 for your favourite song to come on, and hope like hell the DJ doesn’t talk over the top of it and screw it up. It was annoying to hear their voice each time your re-listened to it.

Tape it off the vinyl record: Have a friend who had the money to buy the record and tape record it onto your tape. We’d often do a swap – buy one record each, and tape each others – it was very give and take. A bit like the web should be – let others access your files while you access theirs. The basic economics of trade – by sharing we both had more.

Tape it off a tape: The old school double decker tape recorder – put the tape in and make another version off it.

Steal it from a music store: Heck, I’m sure some people did this, in those days it was the only way to get a perfect recording. All the other methods above had quality issues as the copies were imperfect, until…

… we entered the digital age. All of a sudden anyone could make a perfect copy, from perfect strangers. Napster…. Limewire…. Kazaar……Pirate Bay…. Youtube. Some got shut down, but the music never stopped, and the battle is still alive. It’s a battle people selling recorded music will never, ever win. The technology is an organism with its own agenda. So what happens next when there is no device or host of the music?

“What – no host? What are you talking about Steve?”

20 years from now you’ll have a chip with petabytes of standard holding capacity. It’ll be attached to your body, and most likely inside it permanently. It will be an extension of our brain capacity in much the same way as our notebooks, libraries and computers are today. Except, it will record everything perfectly. It won’t just be what we interpret, it will be an exact copy and it will be inside us. Every sound, every song, every visual, every movie we ever hear or see will be on recall on demand for us to re-listen to and re-watch on demand. We only need to be exposed to it once and we’ll have a perfect copy, forever.

Will that be stealing? 

It will be difficult to police, because the technology will arrive and be implemented into ‘people’ before most industries realise the implications – especially those pertaining to copyright. When our technology merges with our biology, when it becomes part of our permanent memory and experience how can it be stopped? How will corporations even know what we are holding in our organic data banks?

The connected augmented human

The reality is that all biology and technology is built upon the concept of ‘copying’. Everything from single cell organisms, to our DNA, to manufacturing, to emergent technologies. Copying is ‘the’ feature, not a bug. Any business model built on this idea that all copies are controlled by the originator is flawed. It’s a business model that worked for a blip of time for humanity during the 20th century – it was the anomaly. If any business wants to survive in the future, it should be built around the idea where things getting copied is what you actually want.

The simple truth about Virtual & Augmented Reality

Tony Stark Augmented Reality

There’s no doubt these two technologies will start to intersect our lives and therefore business. Startups and big tech co’s are manoeuvring to find ways to plug the technology into how we work, live and entertain ourselves. But Virtual and Augmented Reality sound more complex for a consumer perspective than they really are. Here’s how I like to think about these two technologies to simplify how they can be used.

Virtual Reality: Takes me to places where I am not.

Augmented Reality: Helps me understand and interact in ways I cannot.

They help us do more than we can on our own. Virtual helps us escape and hide. Augmented helps us interact and create more efficiently. Neither is about replacing us.

Virtual Reality isn’t that much different to TV –  taking us to another place, it’s just far more immersive. We could even compare it to a novel or a movie – it’s just that more senses are involved.

Augmented Reality could be compared to signs and instruction manuals. Our smart phone is also used this way, like when we use google maps. Augmented reality is about telling us more about our immediate environment than we could guess on our own. But it can be far more personal, immediate and immersive.

Sometimes the best way to understand new technologies is to compare it to technology we already understand and use. It is very rare indeed for new technology to be more than an evolution of what we already have.

I really think you’ll like my book – The Great Fragmentation.