When you look into the mirror, you may wonder whether it is possible for us to have a twin self who can do lots of challenging things for us, like the difficult project to be finished ahead. Now with the invention of digital twins, it seems possible.
A digital twin is a copy of things like the products or persons in the online forms. Like humans, a digital twin can also develop itself as long as they are fed with enough data(数据).
In 1970, when Apollo 13 was carrying out its task in space, something went wrong with the spaceship, leaving astronauts stranded(困住)200,000 miles from Earth, NASA engineers used spacecraft data to recreate the conditions of the broken part of the spacecraft. This method allowed them to develop solutions that finally brought the astronauts safely home. This event is widely thought as the birth of digital twins. Since then, this technology has been used in many fields, including business, medicine, and more recently, human modelling.
One of the most fantastic uses of digital twins is in health care. Professor Declan O' Regan, an AI expert, shows the new method can help doctors treat certain illness easily and quickly, and it can even help doctors to find ways to stop some kind of illness before it is too late.
Another successful example is to use the digital twin to change the sports science to some degree. Compared with the past when the coaches needed to set up a program to help train the sportspersons, they now use the data to build the digital twin to help the athletes to improve their skills and avoid accidents in sports.
Not everything about the digital twin is good. It is clear that the new technology will influence us a lot, but what direction it will take in the future remains to be seen. There are some doubts over it, as it will result in problems related to ethical(道德的) consideration.