The personal digital twin, ethical considerations

Abstract

The personal digital twin extends to individual persons, a concept that originated in engineering to twin complex machines with a digital simulation containing a model of its functions to monitor its past and present behaviour, and repair, correct, improve or otherwise ensure its optimal operation. Several independent trends in technological developments are seen to converge towards the elaboration of the digital replication of individual human data and life history, notably in health industries. Among the main ones, we consider the ubiquitous distribution of digital assistants, the rapid progress of machine learning concurrent with the exponential growth of ‘personal’ Big Data and the incipient interest in developing lifelogs. The core hypothesis here is that among the psychological effects of the digital transformation, the externalization of cognitive faculties such as memory, planning and judgement, the decision-making processes located within the human person are also emigrating to digital functions, perhaps as a prelude to a later re-integration within the person via brain–computer interfaces. The paper concludes with ethical considerations about these ongoing developments.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘Towards symbiotic autonomous systems’.