Hello everyone and welcome back to Chatterbox, the Q-Loop series for intermediate to advanced English learners that features natural English conversations about fascinating topics like trends culture, hot issues, current events and more.
I'm Andrew and today I'll be joined by my co-host Anna in just a moment.
Our topic for today is the concept of a digital twin.
Now think about this.
If there were two of you at work, what would you do with the extra time?
Well, it sounds pretty crazy, right?
But actually, this idea might not be as far off as you think.
Some companies are now building AI versions of their employees, called digital twins, that can answer emails, sit in on meetings and keep working, even while you're resting.
And that's raising some really interesting questions.
Who owns this AI version of you and should you get paid more if your twin doubles your output?
And maybe even most importantly, would you even want a digital twin?
Well today, that's what Anna and I are going to chat about, and we'll share our thoughts and opinions about these questions.
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Let us know your opinion about this topic, about digital twins.
We're looking forward to hearing what you have to say.
The link to join the Discord, which of course is free, is in the description for this episode.
So this topic today, digital twins.
It was inspired by a BBC news story that Anna found and she discovered.
And I'm just going to summarize the news article for you quickly here.
And we'll put the link to the full article in the description for you.
So if you'd like to read that and view it at your own pace in your own time, you can do that.
But here's just the quick one minute summary for you, okay?
So this article is all about people who are building AI versions of themselves to use at work.
And this is called a digital twin.
Now the article opens with a guy named Richard Skelett and he spent three years feeding an AI.
Everything he's ever done at work his meetings, his emails, his documents, his way of thinking.
And now he has this chatbot that basically knows everything about him.
And his whole company, about 50 people in total, have done the same thing.
And one of the analysts at this company wanted to retire, and after he retired, his digital twin kept doing some of the work for him.
And the same thing happened when one of the employees at this company went on maternity leave to raise her new baby.
Then they used her digital twin instead of hiring a temporary worker to replace her.
And the article goes on to raise some questions about who owns a digital twin, you or the employer.
And what about payments and the financial side of things?
What about making errors?
If your digital twin makes a huge mistake at work, should you be held responsible for that mistake?
All of these things are talked about in the article.
All right.
So I think it's time to welcome Anna to the conversation now and we'll get started with our chat.
I hope you guys enjoy this one.
Here we go.
Hey, Anna, how's it going?
Hello, Andrew.
Hello, everyone.
I'm wonderful.
How are you doing?
I'm great Anna, but I'm so disappointed that this topic that we're talking about today has been branded as digital twin, because I think
There was a huge lost opportunity.
They could have called it a digital doppelganger and that would have been so much better.
A digital doppelganger.
Doesn't that roll off the tongue a lot better?
It does.
Yes.
Much better.
Much better.
So lost opportunity, but it doesn't matter.
We're still going to have a great discussion here about this concept of the digital twin.
Now Anna, you are the one who suggested this topic, and I think it's a great one, but I'm kind of curious what struck you about this article and about this topic that made you suggest it for a Chatterbox discussion here?
I actually had to do a double take when I first read this article.
If you are in the world of perhaps, engineering or architecture.
I thought digital twin when they were talking about it is the process of replicating a building or a structure in a digital way.
That's a very common thing that people are talking about in the engineering construction sector.
So I thought oh, we're talking about that.
I clicked on the article and as I was reading through it, I was like, oh my goodness, It blew me away, because I had no idea that people were working on this.
And essentially what the article talks about is these people and companies that are building a literal digital twin of themselves.
So that people can talk to the digital twin as if it's them.
Their team can speak to them as if it's them.
And I guess it makes logical sense that we would go in that direction.
I just thought, but wow, it kind of stunned me a little bit.
Because I thought, okay, what...
What's next like if you have a digital twin?
What's to stop a company just taking all your knowledge and all your expertise and just being like cheers, thanks very much.
I'll take that digital twin, but we don't really need you anymore.
I just thought this could be a topic that's interesting for a lot of people out there who are working in companies.
And I'm just really interested to see and hear your thoughts about it Andrew, and also everyone that's listened to the podcast as well.
So yeah, it just struck me as something kind of nuts, to be honest.
That's right. the computer and it's a digital version.
Then we can use AI agents to control that digital persona.
It's not us doing the actions, it's almost like we're a puppet.
And the AI is controlling us, but our mannerisms are going to be similar the way that we write and talk.
All of this is going to be represented digitally in a way that's very similar to our real And yeah, I was thinking about it from a variety of different angles.
And I think depending on your perspective, it could be. good or bad.
And I was thinking about it from the perspective of an employee, from the perspective of an employer and from the perspective of an entrepreneur.
So, And I think maybe let's start with entrepreneur, because from the entrepreneurial perspective this makes a lot of sense and actually it could be very valuable.
It could be an awesome tool because if you're a freelancer, if you're doing your own work, if you're working for yourself, if you have your own business, then often you're like really stressed, you're trying to do as much as you can on a very, maybe small budget or you're trying to find an efficient work-life balance, because often people who are in business for themselves they're doing, you know, like working all the time right, like seven days a week, and it doesn't really feel like you're ever getting a break.
So I think, from an entrepreneurial perspective, that this could be awesome, because it could allow you maybe to strike that balance where you could be working half the time and then you could pass tasks over to the AI version of yourself, who would keep working, maybe while you're sleeping or something, and that could help you to find a better work-life balance.
So from that perspective, it seems great.
From the employer's perspective, I think it also seems great as well, because this means the employer can extract more value from the employee and they could get, maybe a digital copy of, like the institutional knowledge or the knowledge that a worker has of how a company runs.
Like, if you've been at a company for a long time, then you have some very valuable knowledge about how the company's culture, how things function, the workflow, the systems that are in place.
And often, I think companies are sometimes afraid of downsizing or firing people or transferring people because They'd lose this knowledge right.
Sometimes the only reason somebody is around at a company is because they know about some system that is in place.
And if that person leaves or we lose them, then we're going to lose the workflow for that system and things could fall apart.
So they'll keep that employee there just because of that deep knowledge that they have about how the company works.
So, from a company's perspective, an employer's perspective, if you could just like get all of that digitalized and down uh, then that would give them a lot more freedom.
They could extract more labor, more work out of the employee for a lower price.
So I could definitely see employers liking it.
However, I don't really see too many upsides as an employee.
To me it's a huge red flag as an employee, you're violating your privacy.
You're violating um, almost like your thoughts and your thought patterns and your way of communicating, which is individual to everybody.
You probably wouldn't be compensated fairly.
Like this is one of the ethical questions that you got to ask as well, right?
It's about compensation.
Should your salary be doubled?
Should it be tripled?
Like if it's working 24 hours a day, that's three eight hour work periods.
Maybe you should be getting triple the salary.
I don't really see too many advantages of it from the employee's perspective, but maybe I'm missing something.
I don't know.
Anna, what do you think about all of this?
I agree with all your points and I think it's really good to look at it from different angles.
I think.
Coming back to the perspective of the employee, I think it's just all to do with the ownership.
Like who owns the digital twin?
Is it the company?
Is it you?
I would assume that, like you said, in order to be advantageous for an employee, it would have to be the employee that owns it.
And then you could, in a sense, license out your digital twin to.
As you said, if you were in a company, you could license it out to them.
If you were self-employed, you could, again, license out to other people, right?
But it's like you said, it's all your expertise, your contacts, your knowledge.
That is your value, right?
That's why people hire you.
So if you give that away, I'm saying in, you know, inverted commas, give it away.
The company could use that for all sorts of stuff.
They could sell it, right?
They could fire you.
Once they've got all your knowledge, data, and expertise, why do they necessarily need you?
Or the other way you could see it is that then you'll be focused on more high value tasks, things that are much more productive.
In which case, that's great.
They want you to be on things that are moving the business forward and ultimately, you know, helping the bottom line.
I can also see, like you said, Andrew, your point about succession planning.
So one of the terrible things when you have somebody that's super knowledgeable in a company, they retire, for example, and then some of that knowledge, of course, is passed on, but it doesn't stay within the company.
So for succession planning, like you said, I mean employers would be like, oh perfect, because we can still retain some of that knowledge in the business and pass it on to other people as well.
But it did freak me out a little bit.
Like I said before, I just thought oh, there's something that doesn't sit.
Well, write with me about that.
But I don't know.
If you could have ownership over your digital twin and you could license it out and you could make money off that, then that seems reasonable.
I guess it's all about the ownership.
Who owns the digital twin?
Is it the company?
Because the digital twin is created while you're working at that company in that specific job.
So does it belong to the company?
Like, I really don't know.
I guess these are questions that are interesting to explore.
But in the article it talks about these people that are really forward and And they've been working on these types of projects for years.
And actually what they said is the biggest thing is, just as I said before, focusing on the value add tasks rather than other things.
And, like you said, being available 24 seven, having a better work life balance, potentially because your team can just plug into your AI twin.
They don't need to actually speak to you.
But again, I would be fascinated to hear about people that are working in business right now whether they think that that would be an upside for them.
Or I mean, could the company just take all your knowledge and then be like okay,
Buy.
I mean, I certainly can't imagine.
I certainly can't imagine companies being like oh yeah, we're going to pay you twice, three times more.
I don't know.
So maybe it could be like a licensing or a subscription model.
Maybe you could sort of license out your digital twin.
I don't know, Andrew.
It throws up so many questions, right?
It's fascinating.
Yeah, it does. raise a lot of questions.
Absolutely.
My mind is just racing with all of the different possibilities hearing you talk there, Anna.
It's really cool to think about, but you got to wonder how much better would a digital twin of ourselves be versus just a regular chatbot?
Do we need to train up a digital twin, or could maybe not a chatbot, but like an agentic AI, right?
This is the newer thing these AI agents, maybe you know they can access all of the knowledge that's on the internet.
So like, that's a lot more than one person can store in their brain.
So maybe we don't really need to make an AI twin of ourselves.
I'm also thinking about like, think of, let's just, let's pick on Tim Ferriss.
Tim Ferriss is a podcaster.
And he's kind of like this jack of all trades.
He's famous for being able to do many things pretty well compared to like the regular person.
And he's into self-improvement and really optimizing how you learn.
Like he's interested in these things.
So what happens?
If somebody like this, who's you know really good at maybe optimization, and he made a digital twin and then he licensed it and you could just go to his website and download his digital twin, then companies would be like you know, if I were working for a company they'd be like Andrew, maybe we don't need you because Tim Ferriss is like this guy, great guy at optimization, he's way better than you.
Like i could see maybe only the the top elite workers having their twins available and then just us regular folks would be locked out.
Like why do we need just joe blow when we can have the best of the best?
Yeah yeah, I guess.
I guess that's a really good point.
Right, so maybe it'll just be these like really well-known, famous people or in the industry or sector that will have this digital twin and people will plug into that.
And that would be probably very lucrative for them, I imagine.
And then everybody else is kind of pushed to the wayside.
You know, the normal people peasants, as we would say in a funny way you know, the normal folk are just pushed to the side.
Yeah, I mean, who knows?
I mean, I don't know.
The idea when I heard it, first of all, it gave me that reaction like, ooh, like...
That feels weird.
But like you said Andrew, we're kind of already going down that route in other ways as well.
So, I mean, is it really that much of a departure from what we had before?
And as podcasters, Andrew as well.
We have so much content of us speaking and doing all of these things, it probably actually wouldn't be that difficult to create a digital twin of us.
Don't get any ideas, anyone, okay?
All right?
Don't get any ideas.
I always have fears about that.
But...
Yeah, I guess it wouldn't be that crazy.
And then you could just have this digital twin.
I'd want to know if my digital twin could be like a better version of me.
You know, maybe I could do some kind of upgrades to my digital twin.
You know, a little bit funnier, a little bit more, I don't know, whatever.
But if I could have an upgraded digital twin, maybe that would be nice.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I think unfortunately the cat's already out of the bag for not just for podcasters but for pretty much, I would say, almost everybody.
Now,
Like, if you can get a few images of somebody, if you can get just a few lines of them speaking, then you can replicate their persona online pretty convincingly.
So this is really scary as well and something that we've talked about here on Q-Lips as well.
And Anna, one thing that...
I'm a little bit worried about is just knowing about how big companies work.
Because the MO for a big company, their bottom line is to improve their bottom line, right?
They want to make as much money as possible for their shareholders.
And often that means... you know, doing whatever they can to achieve that goal.
And I know these days, like so many people get some sort of device from their employer, right?
Maybe they get a laptop or they get a smartphone or something.
And often, those come with some conditions, right?
It's like, OK, if you're using this, it belongs to the company.
And when you're using it during company time, we have the right to monitor that device.
This is a pretty normal condition, right?
While you're working, you shouldn't be watching the baseball game on your laptop.
You should be working on the laptop.
And, you know, often there's some kind of disclosure form that you have to agree to.
And nobody reads those, right?
It's like all this small print and legalese.
But I wouldn't be surprised...
Actually, I almost bet on it right now that there's some clause in a lot of different companies where they're like we are recording every single thing that you do on this computer.
Every key that you hit, we are recording.
Every time you speak or have a meeting, we're recording your voice.
And since you're doing this on company time, it belongs to the company.
And I could see in the near future that, if not already, that companies are going to be like we got enough data and you agreed to it.
This was data that you created while we were paying you for it.
So it belongs to us.
And now we're making the digital copy of you, the digital twin of you.
And yeah, I could see like digital twins.
It's nice to think about individual ownership or licensing or something, using it as a way that we could improve our personal economic situations.
However, just knowing the way the world works and maybe I'm kind of being glass half empty here, I'm not sure, but I could see this.
You know, one day you go into the office and you're like you're not needed anymore.
We're going to use the digital version of you instead.
And you're like, what?
Yeah, you agreed to it.
You didn't read the details.
Or your AI digital twin goes rogue and then decides to turn against you, you know, in like a dog-eat-dog corporate environment, you know, and then they kind of try to manage you out or push you out.
And it's also fascinating to think about even your personal life, how that could change, come into play, because i can imagine people saying like, creating a digital twin, like an ai twin, and then using that for like social interactions and you know, if it was somebody that you weren't really that interested, you're like oh, just speak to my twin, like you know, just just speak to my twin, like i've got no time.
But you know, i i don't know, it could be weird like that.
How about dating?
Your digital twin could go on like 10,000 dates in one weekend, right?
Like just the digital twins, quickly interacting online and you could see if there's any compatibility there.
Like you could go on a date with every single woman in your city in one weekend and get a list of like the top 10 matches or something.
Now that actually seems like it could be pretty positive.
Well yes, because you wouldn't have to deal with the rejection that you'd probably get like not you specifically Andrew, of course, but I mean you as in a person, because a lot of the time we'll meet people, you won't get on with them right.
So you wouldn't have to deal with that type of rejection.
So your AI digital twin could kind of take that all on for you.
And then you could just kind of be whittle it down to a nice little list of people that you would be compatible with.
Oh, that could be useful.
Or you could.
Yeah maybe, if you don't get on with your family so much, you could just be like speak to my digital twin.
Like, you know, I'm just...
I've got no time for this.
You know, you just put your digital twin out there.
So I guess, yeah, people's personal lives too.
But that makes me think that's always down that line of like becoming more and more further and further away, I should say, from actual real life social interactions.
So again, it will be so different in the future, but I still hold on to and I'm so glad that I grew up in a time I guess everybody says this right.
Everybody thinks that they grew up in the best time, but I'm so glad that I grew up in a time where there were real social interactions, without devices and without digital twins.
I'm really grateful for that actually.
It's just going to be different better, maybe worse for some people, better in some cases, worse in some cases.
It will just be different.
But yeah, AI twin is freaky.
I'd be interested to see what you guys think about it as well.
Yeah, and I have to mirror what you just said and communicate that I'm also really glad that I got to live in that time before the internet.
Really, I had like a decade of my life offline, which seems really precious now that I was able to do that for the first 10 years of my life.
However, I also have to say that...
I'm really glad that I'm living right now as well, because I don't think we're ever going to see as much change in such a short period as we are right now.
And as somebody who's into tech and is really fascinated by these things, it's just amazing to see.
Every day is crazy.
It's cool to live right now.
I don't know how things are going to end up, right?
This is the big question mark and everybody's really on the fence about this.
If it's going to be great or awesome or terrible, we don't know, but it's still exciting for now.
So I'm happy to be living in the moments and seeing all of these developments unfold in front of us every day.
Yeah, definitely.
And it's funny, I was just thinking again about the personal AI twin, right?
I wonder if you could, like I said before, make some adjustments and amendments so that you could have this perfected.
And this is kind of like in the metaverse right, where you have this version of you and you could have it maybe look a little bit different or behave a bit differently, like the perfect version of you.
And then you live through your AI twin.
And that's like...
Who you then feel that you are, even though that's not really who you are.
And then you put that out into the world.
Like, that's, you know, that's nuts.
Like, and then people feel like they are their digital twin when they're actually not.
And they would then...
Only feel comfortable putting out their digital twin like their best version of themselves.
You know, like the avatar, would you know?
So I don't know.
You could make it funnier.
You could make it wiser.
You could maybe do all these little adjustments.
Well, anyway, just a thought.
Yeah, I mean, I could see that maybe further down the line, perhaps.
Yeah.
If we did have some kind of metaverse, I'm not sure if that idea is still around.
But I think if that were to come true, then we'd all just be sitting...
In our homes, in front of our computers, living our digital twins life instead of our own life.
And then the world would just fall apart.
Like we need people to farm.
We need people to build infrastructure and stuff, have children as well.
You know that's also right.
You know very important.
Yes yes, if there's only digital twins, i'm not sure that's going to facilitate that process because there is a physical element gets into like the matrix mode pretty, pretty quickly.
So Yeah, with all of these AI topics, we can just go down a thousand different paths, right.
And let our imaginations go wild.
And I think we'll wrap things up here because we're kind of...
Thank you so much for suggesting this topic.
And listeners, we would love to hear what you guys have to say as well.
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All right, so we'll wrap things up here, everyone.
Please take care and we'll talk to you in the next episode.
Goodbye.
Talk to you all soon.
Bye.
