 Now we should begin. Let me welcome everybody. Let me welcome you all to the Future Trends forum. We have a fantastic session today. It's another one of our experimental scenario workshops, and it's a great topic, and I'm really looking forward to where we go. Now, I'd like to bring on the stage my co-conspirator, because today we have a special session indeed. Today, instead of a presentation, instead of a single guest, we are doing a scenario exercise. And the genius behind this is my good colleague, my good friend, out in Armenia, Brent Anders. So let me bring him up on stage first. Hello, Brent. Hello, everyone. Yes, I'm in Armenia. It's 11 p.m. over here, so stayed up late just for you. Well, we appreciate it, and you look great. You look great. You look like how I look like seven in the morning. This is fantastic. Brent, we're going to have to introduce the session, but do you want to give anybody, before I introduce the development, do you want to give people any pointers or any suggestions? So, yeah, I'll let you introduce the overall thing. The biggest reason I think that it's important for us to think about here is AI is developing, right? And it's constantly developing. I follow a couple of different researchers that deal with some advanced things dealing with AI. And they're saying that 2024, the advancements there is going to be much more than 2023. So expect lots of innovations, lots of different changes, multi-modal, all sorts of things. The idea with these types of scenarios, thought experiments, is that this helps us to prepare for possibilities. It helps us to sort of lower our anxieties, lower our stresses in that, hey, we're thinking ahead. We're learning to be proactive as opposed to just reacting. So that's sort of this intellectual experience that we're going through today. Very good. Thank you. Thank you so much. Well, let me keep you on stage while I bring up our introduction, and make sure you're all set for this. Whoops. Let me bring up the correct slide. That would be even better. Let's see. So we'd like you all for the next hour to think about yourselves in your roles at wherever you are in academia. If you're a student, a president, a professor, a librarian, a publisher, a grants officer. We want you to think about that as you respond to a certain development. And the way this is going to work is we're going to present the scenario and then break you all into small groups so you can think about it and respond to it. And then we're going to re-gather and share notes. And then Brent and I are going to show you a second stage of the scenario. And that is going to give things quite a twist. And then you're going to go into groups and respond. And then we're going to re-gather at the very end and reflect on what we learned. So a couple of guidelines to think about. Again, think about who you are in your current role or the role you'd like to have next. So if you're a dean and you're going for a presidency, think about being a president. If you're a new professor, think about being a full professor. We want you to be visionary. Think about the big picture of this, as well as being very practical. And we want you to talk with each other. The future transform community is brilliant. There are all kinds of ideas, all kinds of people here. Now the idea, drum roll please, the idea that we're presenting to you that we haven't shared anywhere else yet is the idea of my digital twin becoming available on campus. This is the idea of a digital twin service that becomes commercially available to the everyday consumer. That is from Google or from Meta, you can twin yourself. You can ask Google or Meta to produce a copy of yourself, a digital copy, based on whatever data that they already have or whatever other data you'd like to add. This is available for consumers. So right now, Wesson could just hit twin and there is Wesson 2.0 available for them to use. It's also available at the enterprise level. So a business, for example, could twin their entire staff. A government department could do it for all their population. Now for this to work, it's going to need data, lots and lots of data. And Brent, do you want to say a few words about that? Sure. So the idea here is that this could be created and what we presented there before is Google could come out with a version and because you have to think about it, if you're using Gmail, it has access to all that information about it. So how would you respond in this situation? What would you say about this? What are your thoughts about this? What do you accept? What are your relations? What are your connections? You would know all this information. So it could use that as well as maybe a quick little survey that you would fill out with some general information and then it could extract all that and create the digital version of you. So now it could be used in many different ways. Again, this would be your AI that you could pose questions to ask it. So that's where it's being created. So in the same way, let's say maybe, no, you don't use Gmail, you use Microsoft Outlook. Well, Microsoft Outlook could come out with one or maybe you don't want to use any of those and you could create an actual twin version of yourself using the data from social media, such as from Facebook. So Meta could come out with an AI that's based purely on all of your posts, all of your posts, all of your reactions, all of your likes. So there's lots of possibilities for a digital twin version of yourself. And it's a flash of you or whomever in the present, but it exists in time. So this can be used to predict things. So for example, if Brent was suffering from an ailment, his medical doctor could create a digital twin of him. And then in the digital environment, test some therapy on the digital self and see how it responds in order to learn how this might go. Now, there are all kinds of ways this can work, not just at the individual level, but also at the group level. So we could, for example, build a copy of a city or copy of a company and see how that unfolds over time. Now, what I'd like you to think about is how would you respond to this in your role or the role you'd like to have? How would this impact your campus? How would this impact teaching and learning, research, campus operations? Brent, do we have time for a couple of quick questions from them? Maybe just a couple of questions. But again, we don't want to, we don't want to keep too much detail because we want people to have a little bit of ambiguity here with when they break up into groups. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. A couple of quick questions have come up. This is one from Adam Mechel, who says, who would interact with the twin? Others, ourselves, both. Fantastic question. Oh, my gosh. Brent, I'd say offhand, the meta and Google would be able to interact with it and the person who ordered the twin would be able to interact with it. But also I would think that depending on the licensing arrangement, other people could interact. Yeah. And that's a question in itself. What are the ethics associated with this? Could I allow it to interact with other people? Could I give that permission so that it goes to a meeting for me? To attend a class for me? These are all interesting questions that are open to possibility. Exactly. Exactly. In the chat, another professor, Mark Rush from Washington University, jokes about improving his digital self or tweaking it to look better and differently. All of that's available. You have to assume that right now that you'll be able to do that to your twin. You'll be able to give it a, you know, lose 20 pounds or add five points. You know, you can start to create a parallel self, if you will. A couple of quick more questions. John Hollenbeck asked if we'd all need beards. Of course you do. Of course you do. Now, Mark is a law professor. So appropriately he asked a question about violating Title IX. That's a good question. That's a question to talk about in your small group. And then we have a great question from Steve Ehrman, who is suffering from lack of imagination, which I don't believe. I can't visualize this alter ego. Is it proactive? Does it understand what I do? I'll have to converse with other economics about this. Brent, let me just take a quick run at this. First of all, it's not proactive so far. And you have to assume in this scenario, this is reactive. It's based on large language models, which are not understanding so far. They are stochastic parents. They ought to complete. But in effect, they can interact very well. You can have a great conversation with them. And they can converse with other people as well. So think about, you know, a chat GPT version of yourself or somebody else. And we have more questions that are coming in, which is excellent. So that's really Tom Hames has a really good observation in the chat. Brilliant. OK, I think we're set to go. I'm conscious of time. I want to make sure everyone gets a chance to thank her. Oh, one quick question. Oh, this is a good one. This is from Elaine at the University of Albany Libraries. How much does it cost to have a twin? Elaine, it's pretty reasonable. And of course, they're scaling of feet, depending on how much you give. And I think it's pretty clear to anticipate that Google, the more data you feed it, the lower the cost it will be. Phil Lingard in Amalta has a really good project in mind. So let me pause all those questions right now. You're all already thinking about how this could work out. I'm going to break you into groups. And for the next seven minutes, I'd like to think about where this goes, how it works, and how we play out at your institution. We're ready to go, Brent. Yeah, yeah, let's do it. There we go. Hello, everybody. Hello, everybody in your various groups, two people, some groups, three people and four. I checked in a few groups and you had some fantastic conversations going on. There are some real experts in the field here. So let me let me just bring up my colleague so we can start sharing. We can start sharing from everybody else to see what you all got to learn. First of all, just Brent, what did you see from the conversations? Oh, lots of awesome things that I never would have even considered because there's so many different aspects to this, right? If I have a digital twin and I'm taking an online course, could my digital twin take the course for me? Right, I think Washington. And then something that came up was this idea of, OK, well, if my digital twin is answering something for me or doing something for me, would that mean that they're becoming smarter? How do we keep it as a real digital twin? Because I have to help me. But if it's not my twin anymore, then if it has different experiences and gets exposed to different information than me, then it's not really a twin. So there's a lot to consider there. Oh, oh, oh, that's a fascinating issue. It's kind of like the HBO series, Game of Thrones, how it just went off in a different direction and not a good one. Phil Long in the in the chat asks, at what point does the learning sink? So maybe you have to have a regular check in to do all of this. Let me let me just quickly put the open podium here. And I'd like to hear from some of the observations that came up about how you would respond academically. I can pull out some comments from the chat. Oh, here is Professor Basu, coming just from New Zealand. Hello, sir. I think you're muted. Yeah. Sorry, I probably hit the podium too soon. I should put it on there, but to quickly respond to that question that whether the digital twin can go ahead of the physical twin in theory, that is not possible because the way digital twin technology works is that that the digital twin is is a digitally replicated avatar of the physical twin. And one of the components of the digital twin technology is that there has to be a breach at all times, which means that anything that should do to the physical twin will be reflected in in the physical twin as well. And anything that should do to the physical twin will be reflected in the digital twin as well. It can be programmed to be in real time or it can be programmed at whatever time that you set it to be. So for that simple reason, by design, a digital twin is is not designed to go ahead of the physical twin. But other than that, I think, you know, this is for an interesting technology of artificial intelligence and machine learning. So I'll probably stop here and how do I leave that? I can leave that for you. Aran, can we can we keep you on the stage for a couple of minutes in case a question comes? Sure. So you bring up an extra an interesting point, right? Because, first, we have to understand when we say digital twin, we're throwing that term out there, right? There's established things like what you're talking about very advanced and there's medicals field that are really looking into this, but that's not going to keep another company from creating a quasi digital twin. I just saw a video that was really interesting where all they did was have somebody fill out a survey and then grant them access to all of their posts and they created a digital twin version of them and then they expose them to this digital twin without telling them that it's their digital twin. Just to see on a on a social psychological level how they would react. And guess what? A majority of them found them to be awesome and wanted to be best friends with them. Isn't that crazy? Because of the social actually person that's me, I'm able to have this real conversation. They seem to have similar likes and interests. So now we have many different implementations of what a digital twin could be. So I love your idea of having this sort of connection that keeps it the same, but there's going to be multiple different possibilities. Lots of interesting things. Yeah, yes. I mean, I was I was I was speaking on on from the perspective of what digital twin technology has been throughout because it's been a pretty old concept because Boeing does that regularly for training their aircrafts. If you remember Apollo 13, what the what the date back then was actually created digital twin of the of the spacecraft to bring back the astronauts to Earth. They have to do that as a contingency. So that's the reason why when you speak about digital twins, the the technical definition is this. There is a physical twin. There is a digital replica and there is a bridge. So without the bridge, you can't really talk about what you're saying here is this that you can create a digital replica of another another person, another entity and label it as digital twin and then you can manipulate that. But that's that. That is a possibility that I didn't think of. So but that's also this interesting and it's really super important that we have these discussions just like this because it's like what you're talking about extremely logical makes sense on an academic level. What I'm bringing up is something that's happening in business, right? And you see how in business, well, they're wanting to make money, of course. So they're not really thinking about some of the ramifications and possibilities. So that's why we really need to be thinking about these things and then push that up because there's so many ethical aspects. One of the things that got brought up in the chat that I was like, wow, I didn't think about this was, oh, maybe my digital twin could be participating in some sort of research, right? And when I say research, like they're the participants, not there's research being conducted on them, on my digital twin. So then there's ethical aspects to that. And then let's think about that even further in that, well, maybe we could reduce some of the ethical limitations because it's a digital twin, not a real person. So maybe we could find out even more if we change some of the ethical requirements. Wow, that even brings up other ethical ideas about, wow, is that going to change my digital twin? Is my digital twin now going to have some sort of psychological issue? There's so many different variables to really think about. Well, there's a lot. I mean, this just unfolds further and further. By the way, just at a procedural note, you are all still in your small groups right now. That doesn't interfere with your ability to hear the stage or participate in the stage. And so if anybody gets not in a group, I will start putting you all together to be individual ones. We had a great question that came up from Steven Daniel Brown who says, have I mistaken in thinking that some companies are creating twins of dead people from your social media data? Well, to the first half of the sentence, you're not mistaken. You can go to character.ai and have a conversation with a chatbot that is trained on historical documents relating to certain figures. So I had a vigorous discussion about dialectical materialism with Lennon, for example. Training them on social media sources. I mean, we may be hitting black mirror territory, but this is something which is pretty doable because we have, some of us have huge social media footprints and that can be used. So, I mean, for example, I would love to see after I die, it'd be great to see if someone could use me for whatever purposes they'd like to. We also see another question that has come up. Oh, sorry, John Holland, but took that further. He's saying a room full of historical digital twins. Dinner with Buckminster Fuller, Groucho Marx and William James, for example. Elaine Lasda adds, we can even get to scenarios per se, lots of questions about identity and self impressions. The impressions others have of us, who is a profile versus a twin, and so on. This is great stuff. Sarah mentions the black mirror episode, but Brent, I think we have to take this one step further to our next stage. Yeah. Are we ready to do this? Okay, Arryn, thank you for joining us. Now, we have, we just gave you the background of what would happen in this hypothetical. And now we're taking it a little further. We're seeing what happens, say, about six months later. Say the autumn of next year. So right now we find that digital twins in this period are a figure of popular fascination and dread. Some people love them, spend time with them, others are terrified of them, try to stop them. They're also religious protests, as different religions have questions about the ontological nature of digital twin. Is it a human being? Does it have a psyche? Does it have a soul? Is it blasphemous? And there are, of course, state regulations and lawsuits going on back and forth about this, especially trying to bring in some of the ethical questions. Now, we also see more digital twin offerings coming from all kinds of places. Different companies are releasing them, different corporations are releasing them. Some of them asked about open source. Yes, in this future, Hugging Face offers a digital twin tool that you can download and run on several research one universities from Switzerland and Japan, have launched theirs running internally, and Khan Academy, as well as the Al-Mesbemaker Instructure, have all released digital twin functions. Digital twins seem to be going pretty widespread at this point. In academia, we're seeing some use predictive analytics for prospective students. That is to model either a literal or hypothetical 18 year old or adult learner to see how they go through a curriculum. We're seeing research models of twins being used in computer science, psychology, sociology, and some campuses are embracing this. Some are protesting it. There are bans and arguments of all kinds. Now, I want, based on that, based on all of that development, how does that change your response? Brent, do you want to add anything more about that? Just a big thing would be that, hey, think about things that have already happened in the past when we've introduced new technology without warning, without properly preparing people, just like with chat, GBT, other with bans, there were people arguing about this. Well, imagine that sort of tenfold because of this other type of technology. And then think about different ethical aspects associated with it. Who has access? Who can have access? Is it a premium feature? Is it something that should be a basic light for everyone? There's all sorts of different ways to look at this. Excellent, excellent. Well, in that case, now that we have that, why don't we start to go back into your groups? And in fact, here, let me just set this up again to make sure that we can all see them. And think about how this changes what you're thinking. How this changes your plans and what other ideas you have. I'm gonna actually make the groups a little bit bigger to make sure that people get a chance to see more people. And let's see if we can put you all in these groups now. Let's see how this goes. Great, well, let's start bringing people back to compare notes as to what they have found. So here, let me just quickly make our displays nice and ordinary. And let me find my co-conspirator, Brent, and bring him up on stage. And let's see, what did you come up with? Now let's start, Brent, what did your groups find? What did you discover? Yeah, so we talked about lots of different things as far as like time savings, because maybe it could attend to me before you. And then we talked about, well, if it does that, are we holding that AI accountable? What if it says something? And so then we talked about maybe using Roger's rules of order. It's not official until we agree upon it. And that kind of comes back to that. Lots of different possibilities then, but I really want us to talk, there was someone else in my group, and I just lost my group, but it was a provost, he's a provost from a small university, and he was talking about, they have a lot of athletes that have to miss class sometimes. What if the AI could attend the class? Again, not all the time, right? But what if they could attend the class when that student couldn't attend, and then still be able to interact? Meaning, ask a question, saying, I'm struggling with this, or I don't understand this part, based off of what the student has already done, based off of their twin. So that's really interesting, and the possibility is there. But then we have questions as far as like, okay, well, how many times would a student be allowed to do that? How does that work and all that stuff? A lot of interesting possibilities there. That would be interesting for instructional continuity issues, of weather or chaos, or there are a lot of different ways that could go. John Holmbeck says, Brent is just talking about CBI. I think you mean closed brain injury? Or did I get that wrong, John? No, I think that's a fantastic one. I was just having a really good conversation with our friend from Pittsburgh, Jeff, and he came up with a related idea that digital twins, if they're based on us, they can do a lot of our functions that are in fact predictable. So they could represent us at meetings with certain predetermined points of view. They could take a lot of arrangements and leave us freed up for the things that are truly creative and very different. Here, friends, let me just open the podium. If you have something that leaps out at you from your group discussion, please press that and you can join us on stage. If you'd rather put in a question in the Q&A box, please feel free to. And we've got a really good one here from as usual from our good friend, Steve Ehrman. He says, I'd like to ask my digital twin to critique my thinking. What am I missing? Is there another way to interpret this evidence? Yeah, you can do that actually right now to an extent with chat box, but having a digital twin, having so much more knowledge, I think that would be fascinating and very productive. And Steve Ehrman told me the key is from what viewpoint? So like based off of my information of what I've fed it and all of my social media content or all of my emails or which aspect of my digital twin? Someone else brought up the question of, well, if Meta does it and so does Gmail and Google and so does Microsoft, does that mean I can have three digital twins? Sure, you can get multiple versions of yourself for these different perspectives on exactly what you're asking. And I wonder if you might end up becoming like a utility where people just settle down for one or if you get huge branding wars. I prefer my Microsoft, well, no one would say that, but maybe they would, right? You know, I prefer my Google because I trust them. Steve, hello, welcome. Thanks. The two sort of historical footnotes on a couple of things you just said, Brian. One was about the athletic team. I believe the first use of online conferencing not on the internet, this is before wide use of the internet. In the early 1980s was at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in order to enable members of the college hockey team to, I think it was take first term sociology because the schedule was matched. Wow. And the first application I know of to use technology to critique my thinking was in the early 1970s. I was inspired by a software natural language processing called Eliza. I knew I had to critique my own thinking because my committee for my doctoral dissertation said, if you don't come up with a different way of looking at what you already know, you're not gonna get a degree. So I sat, I was thinking of Eliza, I sat down with my typewriter, created my twin who was could ask harsh cutting cut to the point questions and who was a woman, by the way. I felt I reacted, interacted with my digital twin much better when she was a female. And so she started asking some tough questions and over the period of a week or two doing this, I completely reframed what my dissertation was about and I'd gotten my degree, which is the, so. Wow, what a great story. That's in the 70s. Yeah, well, right, yeah. So imagine being able to do that based on the 50 years of technological advancement since. Oh, this is great. Thank you, thank you, Steve. But even the applications of that are, we talked about, oh, that's an athlete, but what about people that are injured? What about people that have immune disorders? Or how about somebody like me that, hey, when I was getting my PhD, I got deployed, right? So what about military? So there's lots of different possibilities in how this could be used. Mm-hmm, I'll just tell you, this is terrific. Steve, I'm gonna keep you up here for a minute. We have a question from our good friend, Phil Katz. Let me just bring him up on stage here. Hello, Phil. Hey, Brian, this is really interesting, but I wanna bring us back to the economy for a minute. I was a little disappointed that when you introduced this section, you talked about sort of religious and ethical upheaval, but not religious, they're not sort of financial protests. Where was the AAUP complaining about faculty members being replaced by twins? Where were the student affairs people saying, wow, we're gonna be replaced because why have 15 advisors when you can twin one advisor 15 times because the sorts of interactions that they have with students are actually very amenable to AI as we have it right now. So let me, and let me think one more question about economics here. So suppose you have the student who sends their twin and say they wanna send that twin to two classes simultaneously. Do we charge them for tuition twice? Can you send your twin to the two institutions simultaneously and what happens to the money that goes with transfer? This all assumes in fact that there actually is a feedback and I'm deeply skeptical about this, that there is a feedback between what the twin observed process is and its ability to come back to the original. So I just, I'm not convinced by anything I've heard here yet that we know there's going to be reliable and valuable feedback between that twin in a real interaction and the person behind it who theoretically is learning is represented formally by that twin. So it's a bundle both economics but also real practical questions about how do we know that the twin and the real person are really connected all the time in meaningful ways. Excellent, Bill, Brent, go ahead, take a run at that. Yeah, no, I mean that, we raised that same thing in our small groups as well as the example I gave is right now currently on my desktop, I have 20 windows open, right, 20 tabs open because I plan to get that information but knowing myself I'll probably end up getting maybe half of it, right. So in the same way, yeah, I send my twin out there to save me time or because I can't do something, well now I still have to spend all that time in order to get that information. And then at what point does it stop really being a twin if it has these other experiences, other education that I didn't get information on because again, I ran out of time. So you're totally right as far as what do we do to ensure that it's still a twin? Is that something that just stays open to the individual? It's my choice, but then that would negate certain things as far as giving credit or if we make it so that, well, you still have to pass a test in person or physically be there and your twin can't pass a test for you, that kind of changes things. But some of the other aspects that you bring up, even without the digital twin, those are still real situations that we're facing right now, right. If I'm having an AI replace certain people because it can do the functions of those people, well, that's an economic issue right now that we're starting to face. Yeah, great point. Yeah, I mean, and you're already seeing that. I mean, think of call centers and how many call centers are already replacing people. And soon in the scenario you've proposed, you could imagine identifying the best consumer helper in the world and making 40,000 twins of her and every time you called any customer helpline anywhere, you'd get a version of that super competent woman. And you wouldn't have to listen to the 39,999 people outside who are protesting about not having jobs. Yeah, and you bring up the other aspect of, oh, okay, well, that's me, that's my digital twin. Can I sell that information to a company to do that? Or, hey, let's say it's Meta and Meta is like, well, you don't own that information. What, I don't own my digital twin? No, did you read the fine print? It said that we can copy it and use it. So there's all sorts of ethical, liable things that really need to be considered if something like this were to occur. And if they were to take that twin and use it for productive work, would that be a First Amendment or a Thirteenth Amendment issue? Wow, ooh, nice, nice, nice. To answer your first questions, Phil, Brent and I were really careful to just hutch and to sketch out the scenario so in order to leave room for all of you to do what you just did. And in fact, Steve Daniel Brown asked an interesting version of this, might a company like Khan Academy hire digital twins of star professors? So there are a lot of angles. Imagine the great courses and Google Alliance here where again you could get that person who gives the greatest course on the history of Rome and do a full replication, not just recorded lectures and you'd never have to hire another classicist. Or never hire any more staff. Friends, I hate to pause this right now but in some ways it's best to pause where the very fever pitch future when thinking through this because we are at the end of our hour. Unless there are any objections, I'll put the chat bot, or sorry, the chat transcript up on a blog post anonymized and lightly edited. If you have any objections with that, please say so in the chat. And I'll add that to the recording of this. Phil, those are brilliant questions. Steve, I'm astonished at what a futurist you are before a lot of people in this room were even born. Thank you, thank you both. And Brent, what a fantastic subject. You did just great with this. Thank you so much. Do you have any last thoughts before we are ready? Again, the reason for this is to help prepare us. Now a digital twin might not happen, but it might. So we need to be thinking about this because this affects policy, this affects teaching and learning, this affects all sorts of things. So the more that we can start to think about these and expanding our horizons of what could be the better that will be. And the easier it'll be for us to really start to address it. We're all in this together. So it's awesome that we have this community. And I hope that we continue to develop this and make it bigger and bigger so we can learn so much from each other. Thank you so much, Brent. Well said, well said. And please have a good rest of your night slash morning. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I just want to do a quick plug. Please follow me on YouTube. I have lots of different videos and I really want to develop this type of community where we can think about these things. Interact with Brian, think about the future. That's really what we want to do is again continue to develop it. So just Sovereil, Brent A. Anders, look me up on YouTube. We'd love to continue to interact. Indeed, put that in the chat so everyone can see that too. Excellent, thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you all for such fantastic thoughts. This has just been terrific. I really appreciate you all experimenting with us as we do this scenario exercise. And if you have any last thoughts, chunk them into the chat before we go, but also we're going to keep talking about this in social media. So here's where you can find me on Twitter, Macedon Threads or Blue Sky or my blog. Just use the hashtag FTTE. If you want to look back into our previous sessions, including the ones on AI, just go to tinyworld.com slash FTF archive. If you want to look ahead to our sessions, including one on AI, just go to the forum website. And thank you all again. It's just wonderful to think together with all of you. This is a great way to put our heads together. We're almost out of the year 2023. And I just want to say, thank you all for being with us for this epic year. I hope you all have a great new year. I'm really hoping that you're all safe and well. And we'll see you online next time in the year 2024. Take care all. Bye-bye.