Digital Me
#142 - What digital twins are, where they’re showing up, and why we need to pay attention
Hello friends, I hope you had a good week!
You’ve probably heard the term digital twin thrown around. A few years ago it was mostly used in manufacturing or aerospace—engineers would build a virtual replica of a jet engine or an industrial robot and use it to simulate how it would behave in the real world. A sort of digital test bench.
But lately, I’ve been seeing the concept pop up in very different places. Healthcare. Music. Urban planning. Even grief counseling.
As AI develops, and our ability to train neural network improves, the idea is getting broader—and more personal. We’re starting to talk about digital twins not just for machines, but for people. Your body. Your personality. Your memory. Your presence.
And while some of this still feels early or weird (or both!), it’s not that far-fetched anymore. We now have the tools to simulate complex systems, and we’re getting better at stitching together different data types—text, images, motion, tone—to produce something that looks and acts enough like “you” to be useful.
In this post I want to explore where this is going. Not in a theoretical way, but looking at a few use cases that already feel relevant and at what this might mean for how we work, remember, and spend time.
Super Vicky becomes reality
For a long time, the idea of having a digital version of yourself felt like something out of science fiction. A gimmick from 80s movies and TV shows. I grew up watching Super Vicky, where a robot girl lives with a suburban family and pretends to be human. That version of a “twin” was always either a punchline or a warning: look how strange it would be if technology could imitate us.
And yet here we are. The concept of a digital twin—a replica of a person that looks, sounds, and acts like them—is starting to feel less like a prop and more like a product.
The change is mainly driven by the fact that software got better at pretending. We figured out how to clone voices. We trained models on how we write, how we talk, how we move. We got used to filters, face-swaps, avatars, and chatbots. And somehow, along the way, the idea of a virtual copy of ourselves stopped sounding ridiculous.
We’re not talking about physical replicas. No androids in the house (at least not yet). But a digital twin doesn’t need to walk—it just needs to be good enough to do something useful. Talk to your customers. Train your team. Recreate a conversation with your grandmother. Or answer a question in your style when you’re offline.
The scary thing isn’t how advanced these twins are. It’s how available they’re becoming. You don’t need a lab. You just need data. A few hours of audio, some video clips, a couple of emails. That’s often enough to create something that feels oddly familiar.
We’re getting closer to a point where the digital version of someone can be more responsive, more present, and sometimes more efficient than the original.
That opens up a lot of questions. But first: what’s the point of building one?
Healthcare: the patient that never sleeps
Of all the applications of digital twins, the one that feels both closest and most impactful at least for me is healthcare. The idea is simple: create a digital version of your body—or of a specific organ—and use it to test things before applying them in the real world.
This is already happening. Researchers are building virtual models of hearts, lungs, and kidneys to see how they react under different conditions. You can simulate how a patient with your exact profile would respond to a drug. You can test different treatment paths before making a decision. Instead of relying purely on population data or trial-and-error, doctors could soon run simulations on your digital twin to see what’s likely to work best for you.
And it doesn’t stop at one twin.
You could imagine having a set of them: one version tries the aggressive pharma cure, another follows a lighter protocol, a third explores a new drug. It’s the medical equivalent of A/B testing—except you’re not running the risk on your real body.
For chronic conditions, this could mean faster adjustments and fewer side effects. For rare diseases, it might be the difference between guessing and precision. It won’t replace doctors, but it could give them a much better starting point.
Of course, there are questions. Who owns the data? How do you make sure the twin reflects reality? What happens when pharma companies start optimizing for twin performance instead of human outcomes?
Still, it’s easy to see why this model is gaining traction. It’s incredibly cheaper to test in software than in hospitals. It’s a lot safer. It’s repeatable. And as the tech improves, the promise of personalized medicine finally starts to look real.
We’ve spent years talking about “tailored” healthcare. Digital twins might actually make it possible—without having to trial every option on your real body first.
Memory as a service
This is the part where things get weird. Or fascinating, depending on how you look at it.
A few startups have started working on digital versions of people who’ve passed away. The idea is that if you have enough of someone’s voice, writing, or recorded memories, you can train a model that lets you keep talking to them. Not in a seance sense. Just through a screen, like you would with a chatbot or a voice assistant. Except this one knows family stories, remembers details, and talks like the person you lost.
Some services already exist. You can upload your data while alive so your family has access to a “living” version of you. Others let you build a twin of someone based on what’s left—voicemails, old emails, recorded interviews.
I understand the discomfort. There’s something eerie about simulating grief. But I also get why people use it. For some, being able to ask the question and get a version of the answer is better than nothing.
There’s also an educational angle. Imagine talking to a version of Churchill about World War II, or listening to your great-grandfather explain his job at the port.
Of course, these twins aren’t perfect. They don’t “know” the person. They just stitch together patterns from past inputs. But we do that too, in a way—our memory of someone is always selective, a highlight reel shaped by emotion and distance.
The line between honoring someone and fabricating them is thin. But the tools are here, and people are already using them—not just to remember, but to reconnect.
Whether that’s comforting or unsettling probably depends on what you need.
Artists, performers, and the licensed self
This week, while I was running and thinking about this post, I listened to a podcast that added an angle that I had never thought about: entertainment.
The podcasters started from the ABBA’s “Voyage” show. This very popular show uses digital avatars of the band, captured through motion tracking and visual effects, to perform as their younger selves on stage. A lot of fans really enjoy the experience, and the ABBA themselves are really proud of it because they admit that today (being several decades older) they would not be able to perform at the same level.
I took my kids to see Ed Sheeran recently, and I thought that a large portion of the experience is not seeing the singer perform but rather sharing the experience of the entire stadium singing with you a song you love.
You can see this concept being applied to live music: the bands could build digital twins—de-aged, energetic, and backed by a live band. You buy a ticket to see them as they were, not as they are.
I would love to go see Elvis or The Beatles… and this is not even this futuristic: at Coachella 2012, during a Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg set, a lifelike projection of Tupac appeared to perform “Hail Mary” and “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted,” stunning a crowd of over 90,000 with its realism.
And this is not only true in music: James Earl Jones, the voice of Darth Vader, has licensed his voice to Disney. Bruce Willis signed over his likeness for future roles before stepping away due to health issues. The technology is good enough now that you can star in a movie without showing up. And not just for cameos—full performances, full tours, full experiences.
It’s not hard to imagine Tom Cruise doing Mission: Impossible 25 without setting foot on set. Or Nirvana going “on tour” with a digital Kurt Cobain. There’s a logic to it. Most artists reach a point where their body can’t keep up with their brand. But a digital twin doesn’t age, doesn’t get tired, and doesn’t ask for a dressing room.
From a fan’s perspective, it’s a mixed bag. On one hand, you get to see a version of your favorite performer that’s frozen in time, in their prime. On the other hand, something’s missing. The spontaneity, the tension, the fact that anything could go wrong—that’s part of what makes live performances memorable.
What we’re seeing here is the shift from personality to asset. Artists have always been brands, but now their likeness, voice, and style can be packaged and deployed at scale. You don’t just license a song—you license the artist, even if they’re not involved. And from a business model perspective this allows artists to “scale”.
As I am writing this I admit that I still don’t know how I feel about it, but this is very likely happening!
Business twins
In the business world, digital twins are becoming less about science fiction and more about operational necessity. Companies are using them to simulate everything from supply chains to organizational workflows. The goal is to make better decisions—not by guessing, but by testing scenarios in a controlled, virtual environment before they play out in reality.
Think how a factory might simulate a shift in production lines before moving a single piece of equipment. Or how a leadership team might model the impact of re-orgs, new incentives, or pricing changes before rolling them out.
Airbus simulates fleet operations. Utilities use twins of their grid infrastructure to plan outages and responses.
The same approach is now being scaled to cities.
Singapore has a full digital twin of its urban core. Helsinki too. These cities can simulate traffic changes, flooding scenarios, new zoning plans, and even pedestrian movement. You can test what happens if a new bus lane is added, or how much heat a new development will trap in summer. In Saudi Arabia, the NEOM project is trying to build this logic from scratch—a city designed around a twin from day one.
What makes this interesting is the idea that decision-making might soon be shaped less by PowerPoint and more by simulation. Before launching a new product line, you simulate how it affects your supply chain, emissions, and employee bandwidth. Before changing a policy, you test how it impacts congestion, pollution, or housing availability.
In a way, digital twins are becoming thinking environments. They let you test intuition against evidence before spending real money, time, or political capital.
And when the real world is moving faster than ever, that ability to “rehearse” matters.
The line between proxy and identity
The promise of digital twins is efficiency, scale, and continuity. A way to test things before doing them. A way to preserve presence. A way to stretch what one person—or one company—can do.
But there’s a tension underneath it. As these twins get better, the line between tool and identity starts to blur. If something talks like you, writes like you, and remembers like you—how different is it, really? And more importantly: what do we still reserve for the real version?
The answer, I think, will depend less on the tech and more on how we choose to use it.
This weekend, I’ll be walking in the Alps with some old friends. It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t scale. You can’t outsource it. No avatar can recreate the sound of footsteps on gravel, or the rhythm of a good conversation that starts and stops and starts again after twenty minutes of silence.
Digital twins will get better. They’ll handle more tasks, answer more questions, and keep us more “available” than ever. But maybe the real value lies in the opposite direction: giving us more room to be human—away from the screen, and out in the cold air.
Have a great weekend!
Giovanni