Imagine a digital representation of an object that includes every bit of data ever associated with it or related to it. I think this gets closer to a real digital twin than today’s pretenders. The emergence of these twins will give rise to unimaginable opportunities for the blended digital and material world in a true internet of and by things.

Today’s digital twins’ are like long-lost siblings, separated at birth, popping up in our network with chat messages and occasional photos. Our familiarity is less than superficial, and in the absence of a genuine relationship, we invent one. We don’t know where they’re from, what kind of life they’ve led, or whether they are actually related to their physical doppelgängers.

The typical twin family portrait is that of a big screen or AR goggles with a ‘live’ 3D view of a factory and machines that mirror the workplace outside the control room. In reality, the twins depicted on the dashboard could just as well be on Mars and are as ‘live’ as a thermostat. Our conception of a digital twin today is 90% imagination and 10% digital perspiration.

Sense, communicate, respond, analyse & visualise computing has been around for more than 50 years. The graphics, processing speed and volume of data has improved, our imagination enriched through glimpses of what’s possible, but the paradigm remains largely unchanged.

All manufactured objects (and many animals) are associated with a constant and growing stream of bits of recorded data from the moment of conception to disposal. By the time a product reaches the hands of a consumer, terabytes of data will have been collected, analysed and stored by thousands of stakeholders in millions of systems.

At the end of that journey, the consumer gets a nice origami cardboard box and a paper booklet in 30 languages explaining how to plug it in and switch it on. Enthusiastic owners can go fossicking for digital dust sprinkled across the internet in the wake of an item’s existence while the vast golden seems of valuable data remain sealed in their caves.

The scale of our digital waste and selfishness is mind-boggling. It may be cheap to store those zeros and ones, but the cost to society of keeping all those bits and pieces of information locked away in individual vaults is that we are doing less and less with more and more stuff.

If we’re going to keep this ‘digital twin’ terminology then let’s not sell ourselves short – let go all in!