Key Categories of Cognitive Digital Twins

To effectively design cognitive digital twins, which will digitally represent and augment the physical world, we’ve to start with defining the “purpose of Life” of a cognitive digital twin in the context of the "purpose of life" of its physical twin and the environment in which the CDPT will have to fulfill its purpose of life. This will help us get a clear understanding of not only the initial roles and functions of the CDT but also define and enable the evaluation process for this specific CDPT which will enable it to achieve the expected purposes of life within its new digital ecological system while adding values to our life.

To make the first generation of CDTs as successful as possible, we should identify and define the major categories of cognitive digital twins based on mainly the categories of their physical twins. This approach will help us precisely identify the required existing and future technologies we need, focus the next innovation cycles on filling the gaps and accelerate the creation of the right CDTs.

Currently, I’m recommending to start with the following main categories for Cognitive Digital Twins:

1.  Machines Cognitive Digital Twins (MCDT) – The Digital Physical Twin

This category of CDTs will be the most dominating category over the next years and will have a great impact on everything around us. MCDTs will help us rethink the way we design, build, use, maintain and operate machines, appliances, and devices.

"Creating MCDTs for existing machines will be our first exercise to better understand what smart machines are and how to design and build them"

MCDTs are not just an add-on or add-in. They go beyond IoT, Big Data Analytics, Ml/AI … It is a completely new way of design thinking and engineering approaches in designing, building and using machines and systems.

“Soon, our buying decisions as individuals and enterprises will be greatly influenced by the availability and the quality of a cognitive digital Twin for the specific machines, devices or appliances we would like to buy at and work“

We can see this happening today in different industries such as aviation, industrial machinery, and some consumer devices. Even offering simple data collection and predictive analytics capabilities around the operation of an aircraft or locomotive engine decides winners and losers today.

2.  Human Cognitive Digital Twin (HCDT) – The Digital Avatar

The Human Cognitive Digital Twin will completely change us, our life and the way we live it. Imagine that our digital brain replica, medical record, education, social and work experience, as well as other information are combined together and stored in a Cognitive Digital Twin. This could create a limitless number of opportunities for us.

"Soon, we'll be able to use our HCDT to control our Robotic Avatar(s) not only on earth but also virtually anywhere in the universe. Are we the Avatars of other creators?"

HCDTs will make it possible to finally create the Bio-digital species, where our physical and cognitive capabilities will be truly augmented and freed up from many biological weaknesses and limitations. Our biological evolution will be accelerated and extended by the cognitive digital evolution.

Even the early versions of HCDTs would immediately have a tremendous positive impact on the quality of our life. For example, they’ll help us solve many health problems in cost effective and highly personalized way adding great values to our daily work and private life instantly.

HCDTs will help integrate us even more and efficiently with each other as well as into the physical world around us. A seamless collaboration between different CDTs of machines and objects at home, at work and everywhere in between will extremely increase our capabilities and enhance every aspect of our life.

“Human Cognitive Digital Twins are going to accelerate the rise of Cognitive Digital Assistants (CDA), which I do believe will be one of the major technological breakthrough over the next years and decades to come”

Additionally, HCDTs will be able to socialize, act and collaborate on our behalf. For instance, the HCDTs of a group of people who have the same disease would be bale to collaborate and share the right information in real time within a digital swarm of themselves, their doctors, scientists, and other medical services providers that the whole group can get the best medical care and highly personalized life assistance.

3.  Objects Cognitive Digital Twin (OCDT) - Smart Things

The Objects Cognitive Digital Twins will enable and accelerate the digitization, digital representation, and augmentation of a large number of objects in the physical space. Those objects are not humans nor individual smart machines.

"The size and the level of complexity of OCDTs will vary dramatically based on the nature of the physical object they represent." 

In many cases, machines, devices or other complex physical objects will be built out of a digital swarm of a very large number of OCDTs rather having just one MCDT.

For example, OCDTs of smart streets sensors within a smart City would dynamically join many other OCDTs and MCDTs of cars, traffic management systems, sensors, parking areas identifiers … to create a Digital Swarm representing a smart city. OCDTs might be soon the largest population of cognitive digital twins.

4.  Enterprise Cognitive Digital Twin (ECDT) – The Cognitive Enterprise

Companies of different sizes and industries should understand that rethinking and integrating their current IT and OT landscape as well as their business models is NOT enough to survive and stay relevant in the era of Cognitive Digital Twins.

"Companies should rethink the very nature of their business models, the products they build as well as the services they provide to be relevant in the era of "Smart Everything"

Today, creating an overarching Cognitive Digital Twin representing the new digital core of the enterprise is partially possible. Soon, building a complete ECDT for the whole enterprise will be possible. 

"ECDT-focused transformation would help define, guide and accelerate the creation of its future cognitive digital business, where products, solutions, services, processes, and people are intelligently connected and digitally represented and augmented" 

Doing so will require a new organizational structure and business models, where automated cognitive business decisions will be taken by different CDTs and DSs and most probably in collaboration with counterparts of limited intelligence and data processing capacity and speed, the humans.

"Imagine a day, where the CEO, CFO or even the board of a company would be just a bunch of HCDTs, ECDTs, and MCDTs leading the new cognitive digital businesses"

The first generation ECDTs will mainly represent and augment own company core business. However, soon enterprise cognitive digital swarms will be created out of different CDTs:

              - ECDTs of partners, suppliers and customers companies or functional area,

              - MCDTs of own machines in their own factories, suppliers' machines or

                               machines they manufactured on customer's sites,

               - HCDTs of own employees and in many cases their customers.

This category of CDTs represents the way I understand the “Cognitive Digital Enterprise” and how we should define and implement “Cognitive Digital Transformation”.

5.  Special category: The Cognitive Digital Assistant (CDA) - The Digital Experts

Cognitive Digital Assistants are special category of CDT. CDAs are highly specialized digital experts that can learn and evolve to carry out complex cognitive tasks in the digital world. They’re digital twins without physical twins associated directly to them.

They would be able to help other categories of CDTs as well. For example, they would collaborate with HCDT to augment the mental and physical capabilities of a human. Also, they would be able to provide different cognitive digital services to CDTs as well as their associated physical Twins.

Soon, CDA would span and affect every aspect of our life and reshape every industry we’ve today. They’ve the potential to create a massive new economy; the economy of intelligent digital assistants.

"Like many new major technologies, CDAs will have even more serious social impacts and legal liability than other categories of cognitive digital twins. CDAs could be easily used to mislead people and even nations even before they realized that they exist"

CDAs started to create new categories of economy and jobs. However, they’ll take many white-collar jobs away, possibly in a very short time, while not being able to create alternative jobs for the same group of people.

Conclusion

Some of us would think that creating such Cognitive Digital Twins for machines or humans is a kind of science fiction. Partially, it is. However, I do believe that the innovations, technologies and knowledge we’ve today would be sufficient to get the first generation of real cognitive digital twins designed and built.

“If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”

- Albert Einstein.

However, to be able to create real and reliable CDTs, fundamental changes must happen such as creating new engineering paradigms and architecture concepts top be used for envisioning and designing smart businesses, systems, and machines. Over the next few years, we’re going to build digital twins for some of the existing machines and businesses.

However, the ultimate goal should be to first design and build the cognitive digital twin then augment it with the required physical twins, not vice versa (Cognitive-Digital-First). Many of the machines and devices we’ve today will be replaced by bodiless virtual digital yet smarter machines sooner than many of us would have expected.

Another major change would be shifting our approach from building computing machines to building cognitive smart systems and machines, which can autonomously evolve, learn, reason with and without purpose and interact in a natural yet smart way.

"Cognitive Digital Twins and systems will have profound positive economic and societal impact on our life. However, they’ll spur disruption and raise major issues including moral and ethical issues. Therefore, the underlying architectures and designs of such systems and machines should address that and give us smart tools to deal with such issues and their consequences even before they happen." 

However, we shouldn’t forget that dumb machines have proven to be more dangerous to us and our physical environment than the smart ones. Therefore, for us to be able to envision and build such smart systems and machines, we should stop being frightened by the thoughts that smart machines will someday take away our jobs, have control over us and possibly eliminate us. This is given that yes, they did already took away a lot of jobs. In the same time, they created a lot of new jobs, but different jobs for different people. This is the main reason for justified fears and rejection from some groups of people, who felt the real impact.

Nevertheless, some of us will continue inventing and building such cognitive digital physical twins (CDPTs) whether the rest of us will agree or not. The engine of innovation will never stop. It is just a matter of time and the machine cognitive capabilities will outmaneuver ours. This will happen sooner than most of us would think. Didn’t many devices and machines do that already today?

This major opportunity would help us to transform ourselves and be capable of doing more tasks beyond our current physical and cognitive capabilities as well as even beyond the time and space, where we traditionally existed and lived so far.

Therefore, either we approach smart machines and machine intelligence with an open mind and less fear that we can seize this opportunity or we’ll have to deal with the profound consequences of being outsmarted, outdated or even irrelevant. Now, the choice is ours!

This article was originally posted on LinkedIn.