MyDigitalTwin Exploratory Research report

A Digital Twin is a virtual replica of a living or non-living physical entity, leveraging IoT (Inter-net of Things) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies to create living simulation models that update and change themselves as their physical counterparts change. A Personal Digital Twin (PDT) is a virtual version of an individual (a natural person), built from her/his digital footprints. A PDT is also known as “the algorithm of you” 1 . Commonly, a PDT is intended to be generated and managed for keeping the natural and virtual twins synchronized to recognize personal preferences and needs as well as behavioural changes. Digital Twin and PDT concepts are going to evolve quickly, it is important to address them with an innovative and futuristic approach. The Digital Twin general cyber-physical pattern is going to model and simulate most natural entities and processes, including human beings. Therefore, we must be ready to leverage, control, and regulate the DT of natural persons: PDTs. Differently from objects (i.e. non-living entities), a person has a social dimensionality and a behavioural autonomy. These two aspects are critical when we talk about PDTs; they must be carefully considered and safeguarded in the next era of PDTs. With the advent of the cyber-space domain and the use of autonomous PDTs, it could be difficult to recognize who is the natural person and who is his/her digital twin. A further challenge arises from the fact that living beings (natural persons) die, while digital twins can survive his/her natural counterpart. Important cyber-security issues must be faced soon. The big commercial Internet platforms have been using unprecedented level of processing and insight extraction of exabytes-worth of personal data to deliver fine-grained insights about behaviours, needs, and prospects of a population, up to its in-dividual level. It is likely that PDTs will be developed and operated by digital ecosystems including private and public organizations and capacities. Their governance actions should also include education, training, and capacity building to exploit the innovative fields of both DTs and PDTs. In keeping with the Data act proposal, PDTs might contribute to the provision (in near-Real-Time) of the information required by government to face crises and emergencies. Nowadays, enterprises make fruitful use of the Digital Twin interaction paradigm and PDT, developing dataintensive techniques that are known as customer digital DNA models. Derived from personal data (e.g. customer data), the digital DNA is the complete view an organization (e.g. an enterprise) gains into their users/clients (e.g. customers). In the marketing domain, the customer digital DNA represents a customer’s unique behaviour and tastes. This enables organizations to create personalized and relevant customer experiences. PDTs are more and more utilized in the healthcare and automotive sectors. PDTs promise to revolutionize the G2C (Govern-to-Citizen) platform and services. Stakeholders involved in generating and running PDTs are several and diverse. As in the case of any cyberphysical system, governance and control are two critical factors. There is the need for a regulatory (and standard) framework to safeguard natural persons, apply the European ethic and fairness principles, and create new opportunities to the European single digital market –see, for example, the recent Data Act and Data Service Act proposals, which are intended to complement and extend the GDPR regulation. In the case of autonomous PDTs (i.e. those with a trained algorithm capable of providing the twin with an autonomous behaviour), it is essential to implement a control of the twin behaviour engaging the natural counterpart. It is recommended to provide a human-centric vision of these diverse governances –the recent AI Act proposal is a valuable example in this regard. PDTs will further shift the human intuition of space and time dimension, accelerating the systematic move of our society to the Metaverse. It is already possible to envision a sort of "avatar economy", where each of us can unleash around the various meta worlds one or more instances of “myself” with the task of exploring, learning, communicating, selling, buying. The implications for our society are going to be massive and introduce profound economic, anthropological, sociological, and psychological changes.