AI (Ancestral Immediacies): Digital Twins and Data Doppelgängers

AI: Digital Twins and Data Doppelgängers looks at the rapid growth of virtual representations and synthetic replicas that digital infrastructures enable, considering the implications of this ‘doubling’ of life. A ‘digital twin’ is a digital mirror of a physical object, system, or process that is kept up-to-date with real-world data, which can in turn be used to simulate, monitor, or analyse the real-world counterpart. In contrast to static archives, these simulations offer real-time access and malleability—a promise that could all too easily slip into forms of control. And yet, digital twins are everywhere and nowhere: alongside far-reaching proposals to digitally replicate entire nations such Tuvalu and Singapore, the notion of twinning has already led to the massive expansion of AI personas acting in one’s stead, AI companions, and AI lovers. Within this ecosystem, AI sycophancy, a phenomenon that sees chatbots programmed to please their users, can mutate into chatbot psychosis; a parasocial relationship that rather than assuaging anxieties, replicates, and possibly potentiates them at scale.  

Considering the stories we tell ourselves about the fleshy realities of life, and how they influence the social, what does it mean to live in the mirror world of the digital twin’s flattening? As AI fails to replicate the sensorial multiverse of human and non-human experience, we may need to pay more attention to embodied affects and reactions to external stimuli as part of the Spiel of doubling.