Spatial Computing
You Have A Twin
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
-T.S. Eliot
You have a twin.
Yes, you.
You may have never met, but they exist, a world away, as inaccessible as your shadow.
At first, like the paint strokes of a self-portrait, our twins were created in the digital pigments of Telnet and IRC and self-captured content on the glowing two dimensions of a new and incredible alternate reality called the internet.
Soon, corporations discovered that our twins were the key to predicting our behaviours. Before we even realised the Twins existed, they were put to work, set to discover new ways to sell us products.
Your twin is a digital record of your existence across time. Like a replica of a building formed by the detritus of its destruction left behind by a tornado, the twin is an image compiled from our surveilled actions–a set of records forming our likeness in a digital world.
Your twin might not be you, but it’s more like you every day, and as we continue onto the Metaverse, the distinction between you and your twin will become a thin digital line.
But not today. Today, our twins are distorted in trick mirrors, built out of scraps of the digital exhaust we generate as we go about our lives. And we continue, knowingly or not, allowing our twins to be interrogated by powerful AI’s so they may discover more efficient ways to make us spend money.
What if we were our own twin’s custodians instead of corporations? What could humanity do if the mass of data that comprised every twin worked together to consider the world’s biggest problems?
The Lost Twin:
• Twin (twĭn) Noun:
• One of two offspring born at the same birth.
• One of two identical or similar people, animals, or things; a counterpart.
• Two interwoven crystals that are mirror images of each other.
Chapter 1: Information World
Let’s back up a moment.
As humankind evolved from monkey to homo-erectus on the sub-Saharan plains of Africa, we’ve searched for ways to gather and classify information–about ourselves, the world, and relationships between the people, animals, and objects we interact with. Language, for example, was an invention of encapsulation, allowing individuals to transfer vast amounts of compartmentalised data to one another in real time.
Since the birth of computing, this human drive to gather, store, process and share information has been on fire.
In 2019, it was predicted that the sum of captured information would exceed 175 zettabytes by 2025. To put this in perspective, this is 1,000,750 times the amount of data humanity has ever captured from its origins through 2013. With wearable devices—phones, watches, and soon-to-be AR glasses, we will approach a data-gathering scale that has the potential to capture the total experience of someone's life. The data captured by an egocentric view of the world, that is, a first-person perspective of what you look at, hold, and do, in real-time, coupled with AI to drive intelligence about the relationships between the actions you take and the objects in your environment, will breathe life into your digital twin in a way that will become so realistic, you and your twin could be interchangeable.
But we have a problem, don’t we?
That doesn’t sound exciting. That sounds terrifying.
But why, exactly, is that?
It’s because we’ve never met our twin.
We don’t even know what they look like, what they do, where they live.
We know, abstractly, that corporations control them, and we reluctantly accept this barter because we like the conveniences it can produce, like when an AI shows us the fastest route from one point to another.
But do we want a corporation to control a Twin who could know more about us than most of our co-workers, friends, or families?
First, we have to ask, is this even possible?
Chapter 2: Reality Graph & The Personal Ontology
(AKA: It’s Possible.)
Let’s assume everyone on earth had a device that could record everything we saw and touched in real-time, making intelligent assumptions about our goals and intentions based on human cues, like how long our vision lingered on an object or where we were looking when we spoke. If you took all the streams of data, all the little quirks of human interactions, aligned them by time and place and embedded them with the information that already existed in the world, such as whitepapers, definitions, or manuals, you might imagine an intelligently unified replica of the world that was in every way a digital mirror of reality as you experienced it.
This is not a new idea–we’ve glimpsed at the potential of this world with AR applications, and science fiction has been alluding to it for years. Even in fiction before the internet, we’ve been fascinated by this idea: In the 60s, John Luis Borges, the Argentinian author, imagined cartographers of a great society that created a map so perfectly granular it matched the scale of reality 1:1. Dale Galertner, a computer scientist at Yale coined it the Mirrorworld.
We call it The Reality Tensor.
Reality Tensor (rē-ăl′ĭ-tē tĕn′sər, -sôr″) Noun:
• A database of all humanities information, including relationships between objects, compiled and updated in real-time.
• A digital twin of humanity experiencing entropy as humanity experiences entropy.
• A sum-total record of humanity's actions and objects since the origin of the tensor.
The reality tensor is one giant database of reality, updated in real-time by human actions, experiences, and inputs. Unlike a database that might be thought of today as a static holding of information, like a map that may get updated once or twice a year, the Reality, Tensor is an informational entity accepting new streams of data in real-time, creating a digital version of reality that is alive.
Humanities twin.
The existence of the Reality Tensor would be helpful to all individuals, as it would be an information entity that would contain the state of reality, such as the foot traffic within a building or the age of the milk in your fridge. But perhaps more importantly, the Reality Tensor is a world on a world that is the home for your Twin.
The data gathering necessary to make the Reality Tensor a possibility would capture incredible amounts of behavioural information about human beings in the process. Unlike the digital exhaust that drives the economies of the world's wealthiest companies today–data that is incomplete and often inaccurate—the digital exhaust of the individual would have every detail of your life, including your personality.
Our personalities are comprised of a set of views on how objects, people and places relate to one another in the world, applied to new situations in time and space. Our preferences, like Mingus on the bass over Mendelssohn on the piano, are part of a sliding scale of decisions we barely notice we are making every second of every day. We call this granularity of personal data the Personal Ontology.
Personal Ontology (ŏn-tŏl′ə-jē) Noun:
• The branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being. • (Computer science) is a rigorous and exhaustive organisation of some knowledge domain that is usually hierarchical and contains all the relevant entities and their relations.
Your personal ontology is your unique view of the relationships between objects and entities in the world. This information is individually unique, just as each personality is unique. For example, an antique pen might be a memory of your father to you or a piece of trash to another. Your personal ontology is an understanding of the objects and entities in your life as you regard them existentially. It is the information you
inherently understand without explicit thought as you pick up an object and your subconscious asks itself - what does this mean to me?
To capture enough data for a personal ontology to exist, one would need a level of personal surveillance through the applications and cameras in the world, as well as the cameras and devices you choose to wear that most people today would be uncomfortable with. Surveillance at this level would capture events and ideas we may have never chosen to share with another human being. Today, most people would be unwilling to forfeit this information to anyone. It is not possible, then, to breathe life into our twin until we are certain we maintain absolute control of the privacy of our data.
AI is fantastic at predicting patterns, and as AI research advances, examining the patterns in your actions will build a Personal Ontology that represents your reality. This data object should be your most valuable asset.
Your personal ontology breathes life into the twin. If there were a way to safely query a system that could index the personal ontologies of everyone in the world while maintaining the privacy choices each person set for themselves, we would discover patterns and systems about reality beyond the capability of any one individual's insight.
We call this system - the sum of Personal Ontologies - the ‘Web of Experience’. Unlike interacting with the web of today, which acts as a queueable database with limited interaction, the web of experience would
allow us to ask questions about reality which would otherwise be impossible to ask.
Why is there poverty?
Is there a more equitable form of government?
How do we save the most human lives in the outbreak of a pandemic?
Like Giuseppe and Pinocchio, the personal ontology is how we cut the strings.
Chapter 3: Contextual Computing to Socio-existentialism:
But why should we bother? Is this something humanity needs?
We believe our Twins will have a profound impact on our lives, directly influencing how we decide how to live, think, and talk about what a person's lifetime means to the world.
Ultimately, we want a society built on the principles of utilitarian existentialism.
Utilitarianism - Noun
• A system of ethics based on the premise that something's value may be measured by its usefulness.
• The theory that action should be directed toward achieving the "greatest happiness for the greatest number of people"; hedonistic universalism.
Existentialism - Noun
• “A twentieth-century philosophical movement emphasising the uniqueness of each human existence in freely making its self-defining choices”
If the Reality Tensor existed today, populated by our twins, could you think of applications that could be built based on reality's state of being?
The physics restricting our interactions in reality is very different from that of our twins. While our twins are bound by the physics of photons, they are able to navigate time very differently than we do. They can go backwards, revisiting a conversation between co-workers at some point in the past, or forwards, breaking away from the boundaries of the physical world, like your shadow tearing itself loose to experience a life different from your own.
Although we are just beginning to explore the implications of the Twin, there are clear applications that range from the practical to the profound.
Contextual computing / Optimal Guide / Predicting the future:
If you can understand a person's actions in their environment, you can predict needs based on their behaviour. If you can predict what someone will need in the subsequent moments, you could inform a completely new way to interact with technology.
We already use this kind of prediction when our GPS app tells us the best route around traffic. With AR glasses, and the ability to layer three-dimensional imagery over existing spaces, we can build new interfaces that adapt to us as we switch activities, breaking free from the 2D interfaces we use today.
We call this new dynamic relationship with our digital world contextual computing.
contextual computing (n)
• Definition 1
• Definition 2
This could be map directions laid directly onto roads or x-ray views of our walls as we look for studs. Screens are irrelevant when all the spaces around you can hold the three-dimensional information that is most important to you.
Our relationship with our twins is not strictly causal. While our experiences bring the twins to life, the twin's experiences can also help inform how we want to live. Our twins can advise us on how to achieve our goals.
With a twin, we could ask about the best way to proceed in any situation- like, will this meal spike my blood sugar? to longer-term goals such as, what’s the best studying methodology to pass the bar exam? As our
twin is personal ontology, they could contextually predict routes best tailored to your individuality, like advising an auditory studying process for someone who is dyslexic or cautioning a person navigating sobriety to avoid activities and actions most likely to lead to relapse. As AI technologies progress, our twin’s prediction timeline increases. As the timeline increases, our questions of the future are theoretically limitless.
But questions about the future are never so binary…
As we face decisions in our lives, we would be able to arm ourselves with a host of predictions about each unique path. As your twin is your personal ontology up until that very moment, that twin can set out on its own task or prediction, while another, moments later, takes the opposite path. You don’t just have a Twin, and you have Twins. Each one of them could be set on a task or prediction that you dictate, and would each provide valuable digital labor that could become an income stream for you and your loved ones while informing you as you asked yourself, how should I live?
Set the Twins on any path you choose and witness the outcomes like a movie of the future that may never come to pass.
In the physics of the world of the lost twin, all those futures are happening all at the same time.
The collective personal ontologies of the world form a worldwide web of experience. The impact of this informational system cannot be overstated. Governments may use the web of experience to predict diplomatic solutions to wars. Doctors could probe for cures for disease. A pandemic would be recognised in the world almost immediately, along with information about where it started, how it spread, and what blood types showed greater immunities. Humanity's capacity to think collectively about existential problems would expand beyond the potential of any one individual's contribution to society.
As Reality Graph is a digital twin of reality, it will also be a record of changes in reality over time. The reality graph of two weeks ago will be quite different from that today, just as we experience the arrow of time in our lives. If we clearly see both the past and the present, patterns will emerge that will allow us to see the future.
A radical new data economy:
To achieve the privacy control necessary for the Reality Graph and our Twins to exist, we would have to retool the business models of the world's biggest corporations. Financially, it sounds impossible - all stick and no.
carrot, but it would also mean the creation of a completely new untapped economy in which everyone in the world could participate. As corporations might lose money retooling their revenue models, a completely new economy space would allow for a massive expansion of services, applications, and products, all fueled by the data of the Twins. So, while the current model may become financially untenable, it wouldn’t matter as companies expanding into selling goods and services that currently do not exist would generate more revenue than continuing the status quo.
Every company on earth would be engaged in the purchasing of information from individuals on a scale that does not exist in any form or function on earth today. They would do this because the economy of products, the applications, and the value their businesses could provide are already fueled by the incomplete images of trick-mirror twins, allowing our most successful AIs to function. The US government alone would spend on a massive scale on predictive data operations that asked questions such as, where should we place this road? Or when will this bridge collapse? How do we de-escalate from nuclear war? And every human being on earth would have the option to selectively share their twin at various levels of anonymity as a stream of income or not to contribute at all, using the twin solely for themselves.
Chapter 4: The Immortal Twin:
For centuries people have asked themselves, what is the point of my life?
In a combined digital/physical world populated with our Twins, we can begin to ask questions such as: What is the point of a society? What is society's goal over a single lifetime? What should the goal of humanity be over a thousand lifetimes?
Today there are many disparate versions of our twins collected by different companies for different reasons. Meta, for example, may have a twin built from your activities and interests on social media. Third parties collect and sell data gathered about you as you move from site to site, sold for revenue by those companies that collect huge amounts of digital exhaust but don’t have the resources to build their own twins. Google’s twins are based almost entirely on search data.
None of these twins are exactly alike, but they all represent a distorted view of your humanity. None of these data are enough to have and use something as powerful as the Reality Graph, and none of these twins are an accurate representation of the individual. And they never will be, if human beings believe that the control of their data belongs to a corporation.
We need to trust that our twin is ours alone, that the intimacy they share with the details of our lives is as private as our thoughts, and just like a thought, we can choose to share with others or to never share at all. For this to happen, no one company can have control of the data we generate. This is a global problem that we must face- who decides how the data is managed and kept private? Who decides on the rules? And maybe an even more annoying question: who decides who decides?
We need data brokers to manage the distribution and remuneration of twins. We need guiding principles and programs to ensure our twins stay firmly in our control. For the full potential of the Twin to come into being, we must conquer technical, philosophical, and ethical hurdles, rewriting the internet as it currently exists to lay the foundation for the next evolution of humankind.
Ultimately, there are two reasons to do this. Individuals should be allowed to decide for themselves what the best version of their lives should be. And if we are to evolve as human beings, in the pursuit of utilitarian existentialism, our technologies should be asking the larger questions such as, what should the aim of our lives be? And what is the purpose of society?
We’re at a crossroads. Do we wish to forfeit the potential of the twin and continue as is, making Faustian bargains with our data in exchange for daily conveniences? Or do we want to take full control of our own stories,
exploring humanity's potential in a societal data revolution? Is there a future where humanity can choose to avoid war, famine, and self-annihilation because the paths of self-destruction are laid out before us as clearly as the tracks of migrating animals in a field of snow?
What is your twin, really?
Your twin is a radical choice. It is an intelligent past that enables a predicted future where you choose to do what you want with your life with the full intelligence of humanity brought to bear upon it. It is your digital labour that provides for you and your family. It supports your causes, like solving medical mysteries or surviving climate change. Let the experiences accumulated over a lifetime teach your children, contributing to the total knowledge of humanity. Or don’t. For that future to exist, the only unbreakable conditions are radical transparency and radical choice. At our end, when our egocentric experience is done being written, we can choose to gift the knowledge accumulated over our unique lifetime to our descendants and humanity or say no and send it back into the void.
We hope, though, that you won’t. As our time may be over, our Twins may continue on, and we have just begun to fathom the contributions an individual could make to society when the full wisdom of their lives never dies. It is time for you to meet your twin.
END
So, in the words of Kenneth Craik, Ch. 5, there is a hypothesis on the nature of thought. The Nature of Explanation” (1943) “ If the organism carries a “small scale model” of external reality and of its possible actions within its head, it can try out various alternatives, conclude which is the best of them, react to future situations before they arise, utilise the knowledge of past event in a much fuller, safer, and more competent manner to the emergencies that face it.
Thanks for Reading Q
