digital twins are representational
Digital twins are not a scientific vision rather an engineering one, even when a group of smart people says otherwise publicly </changemymind>. I didn't like it, even tho it is a major component of my $job, and it took a eureka moment to see why a little more clearly.
We write simulation code but I never saw it as digital twin but something new, a kind of conceptual oracle. The algorithm must have listened because it served up this nice explanation of Deleuze to clarify it, with an excellent drum machine analogy no less:
https://youtu.be/iDVKrbM5MIQ?si=QOoQANSspran1pgS
Watch or don't 😑 The relevant bit for me was to identify digital twins as representational, limiting their capacity to generate truly new ideas and insights. This casts the tech as severely limited to only e.g. biomedical engineering purposes, sapping real scientific efforts of brain power 🧠, idea space 🌈 and money 💰.
Not incidentally, I think the artisan approach from slow science reinforces this idea 💡: fast science tries to build an ever growing tree 🌲 of representations by substitution, but the true newness comes from taking the time to break down 👇 previous concepts and rebuild from raw, direct experience.