Digital Twin
History
In the mid-2000s, a manufacturing expert named Michael Grieves started to spitball ways to make factories more efficient. Instead of a manager peering down on the factory floor from above, trying to sense how things were going, Grieves thought there should be an exact virtual replica of every physical nook, cranny, machine, forklift and worker that the manager could analyze on a computer screen. Create an endless stream of data from a network of sensors and cameras that flowed from the real factory to the virtual one, and you’d get an ever-changing real-time representation of its brick-and-mortar counterpart. Anything that changed in the factory would change in the model, instantly: the physical and the virtual locked together in what the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard might have called an “ecstasy of communication.”
What power this would give a factory manager! Perhaps they wanted to see how a change to one of the production lines would impact the entire operation. Run a simulation to see how it might play out. Should anything go wrong, rewind it back, find out what the hell happened. Heck, the manager wouldn’t even need to be anywhere near the physical factory — they could be off in a beach house on some idyllic island.
Grieves, along with a NASA researcher named John Vickers who had been mulling over a very similar idea, called this a “digital twin.” “Not only the factory manager, but everyone associated with factory production could have that same virtual window to not only a single factory, but to all the factories across the globe,” he wrote in 2014. Here at last was Hamlet’s king of infinite space.