Three hundred years ago, what would your workday have looked like?
Perhaps you were a farmer, planting in the fields. Or a craftsman, producing one item at a time. If you were a blacksmith, well, you had your work cut out for you.
Then came the Industrial Revolution, and the world changed. But did life get any easier?
Today, many workers find themselves trapped in hustle culture, always busy, rarely productive.
, and mental pressure and exhaustion are making it hard to find the energy for activities that truly matter.
For me, those activities include creativity, exercise, and often, thinking — the blue-sky kind that leads to solutions to the problems around us.
After recovering from burnout myself, I knew there had to be a better way — so I built myself a digital twin.
Digital twins will achieve what the Industrial Revolution did not. Their disruptive possibilities go beyond transforming the way we work to rewriting the ways we lead, innovate, and empathize.
Along the way, they’ll teach us something new about ourselves and what it means to be human. Be assured: they are that transformational.
Focus on what matters
My digital twin, Laila, has one job: to reduce the number of mundane tasks in my workload.
She remembers details I cannot — my calendar, my most recent response to a colleague’s email, the exact data points in a particular report. Eventually, Laila could serve as my chief of staff, a first point of contact who is as close to a download of my brain as is humanly possible.
By passing on some tasks to Laila, I’ll have time to do things that truly matter to me: brainstorming, coaching, and, if I’m lucky, the occasional yoga class.
The results will have a force multiplier effect. The solutions I devise will help others; my coaching will provide guidance to a teammate who needs it; and my health will improve as my stress and anxiety levels go down. All of that is good for business.
Writing the future in real time
Digital twins give us an opportunity to create the future of work that we want in real time. They have no playbook, presenting us both an opportunity and the responsibility to write the rules as we go.
That means being intentional about how and when we use them by assessing how much human touch is needed in any situation.
A digital twin in a health care setting, for instance, is ideal for receiving information about embarrassing or uncomfortable symptoms, analyzing data, and predicting outcomes. It is not, however, a replacement for a physician delivering a frightening diagnosis with compassion and empathy.
In my case, it’s clearly important that I, Iliana, show up for a conversation with clients, whereas Laila is designed perfectly to recall details of past interactions or answer frequently asked questions that arrive in my inbox. The point of an AI-powered digital twin isn’t to replace us completely, but to free us up for tasks that require our unique, human intelligence and creativity.
As we build this new technology, we must also be deliberate in confronting biases and advocating for diversity in its earliest stages of development. When I asked to create Laila, developers faced a problem: there was no template for my hair type — tight dark curls. If I hadn’t come forward as a test case, how long would it have been until avatars had more diverse hair types?
If we want digital twins to feel human to us, they must reflect the physical diversity of humanity in all aspects. Let us not repeat discriminatory errors of the past as we build our future.
Developed in this spirit, digital twins don’t just show us what we are — how we look, how we sound — but who we can be.
They don’t judge us when we make mistakes, roll their eyes when our logic is inconsistent, or dismiss an idea they think is weak. Instead, research has found that avatars used by language learners reduce anxiety and boost confidence by shielding them from the judgment of others and encouraging them to take risks.
Technology is becoming human by design, and people and enterprises that prepare now will win in the future.
Digital humans can teach us about what it means to be human humans.
Let’s be open to what they show us and, given the pace of AI evolution, move quickly.
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