Part 1: An introduction to digital twins

This post is part of the blog series Digital Twins.

1. Part 1: An introduction to digital twins

Going beyond AI

Much of today’s AI conversation is fixated on the future of artificial general intelligence (AGI), and even artificial superintelligence (ASI). These ideas spark both fascination and fear. However, they leave us wondering: how will AI systems and swarms of AI agents actually work together?

To answer this question, we shift the focus of this blog series to the concept of digital twins. Digital twins are designed to create a convergence zone – a space where physical and digital systems connect, reflect, and respond in real time. They are not speculative constructs – they are emerging environments in which interconnected physical and digital systems unfold.

Rather than chasing abstract intelligence, we ask what kind of system is needed to support complex, relational realities.

More than a tool

Technology is deeply intertwined with our lives – from the simplest tools that extend our hands and minds, like pens or smartphones, to highly sophisticated infrastructure that connects people worldwide, such as the internet. Regardless of its fundamental influence on our lives and human evolution, we still regard technology as something apart from us.

We treat it as if it belongs to a separate domain. We act as though we live in one system, and technology in another. However, a simple test can bring this illusion to the surface: what happens when technology fails to support our human system?

A state of emergency

A recent power outage across Spain and Portugal exposed how deeply embedded our lives are in these invisible structures.

Trains stopped mid-track. Flights were grounded. Police were called not to stop violence, but to prevent disorientation from spiralling into chaos. Food systems, sanitation, and communications – especially in the ‘first world’ – depend on a technical layer we rarely see but cannot live without. The absence of electricity stripped away more than convenience; it threatened to fracture our social coherence.

Therefore, Spain’s Interior Ministry declared a national emergency and deployed 30,000 police officers nationwide to maintain order, while governments from both countries held emergency cabinet meetings. This incident forces us to become more aware of the gravity of our factual relationship with technology.

When our survival depends so intensely on it, does the word ‘tool’ still do justice in describing technology’s relevance to our human system?

Our relation to technology

We are born into a world where technology is already present. Technology is not just a set of tools but an environment. It shapes our thinking, expectations, and behaviour before we are even aware of its scope of influence. When the system runs smoothly, we forget our dependence on it. We take it as given, call it ‘infrastructure’, and move on – until the infrastructure is disrupted, and with it, our sense of order (inspired by Jacques Ellul’s The Technological System).

What disturbs us most is probably not the failure itself, but the reminder of our profound dependency on the technological systems we build. This embedding often goes unnoticed until we try to find words to describe it. At that point, we tend towards familiar habits and anthropomorphism. We start treating technology as human – assigning feelings, intentions, even identities. This tendency grows strongest in moments of awe, especially with technologies like AI.

Worse than anthropomorphism?

The real danger might extend beyond anthropomorphism to what we overlook. Our dependence on electricity is a good example. At first glance, it may seem like an odd comparison – almost absurd in the context of anthropomorphism. Electricity doesn’t look, speak, or pretend to think like us. But that is precisely why it matters. We depend entirely on it, yet we no longer project identity or consciousness onto it. We do not worship it, fear its motives, or imagine it replacing us. We expect it to work. Usually, we are reminded of it through art – for example, the 2024 film Leave the World Behind by Sam Esmail.

The topic of AI is different – not because our dependency is greater, but because its appearance of intelligence reactivates old habits of mind. AI simulates interaction, mirroring our language and knowledge. It seems to respond and relate to us, feeding the human tendency to react emotionally when something appears to be aware, with agency or even consciousness. Whereas electricity faded into infrastructure, AI revives the drama of some form of mysterious presence.

From fire to AI: A shifting relationship

There is a long lineage behind our technological dependencies. Fire was our first elemental power – controlled, feared, and worshipped. It transformed how humans lived. Fire was not seen as neutral; fire and invention were personified and sacred. In Greek mythology, Hephaestus, God of fire and forge, was more than a blacksmith – he was a divine creator. In The Iliad, he crafts tripods that roll on their own, and golden handmaidens with voice and intelligence – mythical precursors to artificial life.

The narratives of mythology remind us how humans give divine meaning to inventions. Later, electricity arrived. Although it empowers entire infrastructures, it has slipped into invisibility and silences modern life. With AI, it is a different story. Whenever it becomes a common technology, we stop calling it AI and label it with something more mundane, like computation or automation. This is known as the AI effect – a modern version of Nietzsche’s concept of God as Lückenbüsser, a delusional gap-filler for those who act as priest-like saviours of humanity (Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘The Priests’).

The mystery is kept alive through the way we talk about AI. We reawaken ancient patterns of storytelling. We speak of systems that seem to think, speak, and even listen. While we no longer summon gods, we imagine sentient chatbots, ethical dilemmas, and rising, superior intelligences. The language of myth returns, veiled in mathematical functions, binary code, and the allegedly mysterious workings within the black boxes of neural networks.

Each step – from fire to electricity to AI – marks a shift in capability, and in our understanding of intelligence, knowledge, power, presence, and trust. Therefore, we need to distance ourselves from the fiction and ask what kind of system we are building, and what kind of world it will sustain.

What’s next: Replicating for survival

In Part 2, we revisit the first real-life application of digital twins: the Apollo 13 mission. We will explore how, in a moment of crisis, NASA created a mirrored system to model, test, keep the human astronauts alive, and safely bring them back to Earth.

The concept of creating dynamic, responsive digital twin systems to guide action is now used across industries. From energy grids to healthcare, urban planning to aerospace, digital twins have become essential to managing complexity, risk, and coordination. By returning to their origin, we uncover the technical innovations behind digital twins and the relational shift – a shift in thinking about systems as environments, capable of responding to the unexpected and sustaining human life under pressure.