Fully Fungible Body Futures

All of the sudden, the digital twin is here. It's not a perennial topic in science fiction, it's not something that has ever been posted here, at least not until the past year. And it's one of those things that doesn't seem like a big deal; in fact, we're not even sure what it's for. (It has been around since the 1970's though, used to understand NASA spaceships).

The one thing it is -- it's easy to understand. You make a digital version of yourself, modeled in a computer, living in a simulation, if you will, and constantly updated with real-time data, so that we can run experiments on it ---instead of running the experiments on you---. 

If you're a cancer patient, with all the bits and pieces that make you who you are, and we want to know if our cancer treatment will work in concert or against all those bits and pieces of yourself, we could always just give you the treatment and see what happens, right? Isn't there a better way? Yes, now there is. 

And one day, sometime between when you get a much better result from your cancer treatment and when the entire human race has been uploaded to low earth orbit satellite router networks, we will watch as these twins, or doubles, or avatars (or self-replicates) become more important than the bodies they serve. 

Unrelated image credit: Oort Cloud Pablo Carlos Budassi via Wikimedia

Creating 'digital twins' at scale to improve drone deliveries

Jun 2021, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-06-digital-twins-scale-drone-deliveries.html

A delivery drone suffers some minor wing damage on its flight. Should it land immediately, carry on as usual, or reroute to a new destination? A digital twin, a computer model of the drone that has been flying the same route and now experiences the same damage in its virtual world, can help make the call.

Kapteyn and colleagues sought out a unifying mathematical representation of the relationship between a digital twin and its associated physical asset that was not specific to a particular application or use. The researchers' model mathematically defines a pair of physical and digital dynamic systems, coupled together via two-way data streams as they evolve over time. 

"I think this idea of maintaining a persistent set of computational models that are constantly being updated and evolved alongside a physical asset over its entire life cycle is really the essence of digital twins," says Kapteyn.

via Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Michael G. Kapteyn et al, A probabilistic graphical model foundation for enabling predictive digital twins at scale, Nature Computational Science (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s43588-021-00069-0

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s43588-021-00069-0

Tumor avatars' predict patients' response to immunotherapy

Jul 2021, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-07-tumor-avatars-patients-response-immunotherapy.html

This is just a simple explanation of how digital twin technology works in medicine:

"We first cut patient tumor samples into small pieces and then treat these 'tumor avatars' outside the patient's body with different therapies, to see which one works."

via Netherlands Cancer Institute: An ex vivo tumor fragment platform to dissect response to PD-1 blockade in cancer, Nature Medicine (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41591-021-01398-3 

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41591-021-01398-3

Digital twins for cancer patients could be 'paradigm shift' for predictive oncology

Dec 2021, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12-digital-twins-cancer-patients-paradigm.html

We've also been hearing this term used in reference to NFTs, in the context that you will soon need to establish a digital deed for yourself, before someone else does it for you, if you know what I'm saying.

But back to the story at hand:

Cancer Patient Digital Twins (CDPTs) would reflect a patient's molecular, physiological and lifestyle characteristics as they evolve over time and across different treatments, and help "usher in a new age in medicine" by increasing the probability of optimal care, the authors concluded.

It would address changes across timescales from the molecular level to the population level, and as the patient's disease state evolves, the digital twin would incorporate real-time observational data to predict future states.

Researchers envision clinicians will use CPDTs to perform virtual experiments, simulating the patient's disease trajectory under different treatments. At each visit with a clinician, the predictions would be compared with real-life measurements to assess the digital twin's performance and update it in a "continuous learning" loop to inform patient decision making.

via Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: Tina Hernandez-Boussard et al, Digital twins for predictive oncology will be a paradigm shift for precision cancer care, Nature Medicine (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41591-021-01558-5

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41591-021-01558-5

Post Script:

Who owns "digitaltwin.com" you ask?

General Electric - Digital Twin Creation - GE builds highly complex physical assets essential to critical infrastructure including energy production and distribution, air and locomotive transport, and healthcare.  A Digital Twin is developed and informed by a massive amount of design, manufacture, inspection, repair, online sensor and operational data and employs a collection of high-fidelity computational physics-based models and advanced analytics to forecast the health and performance of the asset over its lifetime.  The accuracy of the Digital Twin’s representation grows over time as more data refines the model and similar assets are deployed with their own Digital Twins.  Data are gathered continually to maintain an up-to-date model.  The Digital Twin provides detailed knowledge of the asset, forecasts based on “what if” scenarios and a live reference from which to build applications to optimize services, performance, efficiency, maintenance, supply chain, business operations and more.

Contact Us To Build Your Digital Twin

Notes:

Polish singer claims to be the first in the world to sell off digitalised parts of her BODY as NFTs with her 'rarest parts' including 'G-spot, nipples and lips' starting at £73,000. Daily Mail. Sep 2021. [link]

The Anomaly, by Hervé Le Tellier (2021) is a virtuoso novel where logic confronts magic, a witty variation on the doppelgänger theme. It's not about the concept of digital twins, but I thought it might fit here regardless. [goodreads link]

Digital Body Brokers and Future Futures (aka The Intergalactic Bodynet), 2021

https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2021/06/digital-body-brokers-and-future-futures.html

Full Steam Ahead (aka the Kufizoid, the Kufi-probe), 2021

http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2021/06/full-steam-ahead.html

Anthromimetic Cosmogenesis (aka the Virtual Facebook World), 2021

https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2021/01/anthromimetic-cosmogenesis.html

Patrol the Skies

Today it will 'feel like' 107 degrees in the armpit of New Jersey. You don't know what you've got until it's gone. The backyard swimming pool my parents thoughtfully incorporated into our bucolic suburban domicile is a distant memory.

But Microsoft knows what's up, they put one of its servers underwater in an effort to cool the thing better. No you're not normally supposed to put your computers underwater. Thing is, one of the primary limits to the power of what a computer can do is heat. Computers don't sweat like we do, so we don't notice it, but they work really hard to do all that binary computation. [Today is Leibniz bday, thanks Google Doodle, he refined the binary number system, among many other things integral to our modern world.]

So if we could only figure out a way to keep computers cool. Air conditioning is very expensive, and lemonade doesn't really work (does that really work?). In fact, Microsoft is trying this as a part of their sustainability effort. I know you've recently heard how much energy is used to mine cryptocurrencies - it's more than the energy expenditure of some nations. So if we can figure out a way to cool these things down, that would help a lot.

Now to the main point: We will not stop by putting computers underwater, because there is a place much colder than that, and we've been going there a lot more than usual as of late. Yes, outerspace is the next frontier for high-efficiency computing.

SpaceX, seen above, is well on its way to giving us a cozy place in low earth orbit that we can call home to our global digital infrastructure. Seems to make more sense than dunking your mainframe in a bathtub. And now, if you will for a moment imagine our human future, as we leave the meat behind, to exist entirely in the digitally-mediated reality of a constellation of hundreds of thousands of computer satellites blinking in low earth orbit. 

Notes:
image source: Space Jellyfish from SpaceX launch

Microsoft sinks data centre off Orkne
Jun 2018, BBC

Patrol the Skies Music

The Beginnings of the Mass Transference Device

AKA Metabots, Mindborgs, and Organic Computing

source

This now makes three-people babies the second scariest thing I've ever heard.

Wiring Monkey Brains Together Has a Point, Say Scientists
WIRED, July 2015

"Today, researchers at Duke University announced they have done nearly that, wiring animal brains together so they could collaborate on simple tasks. Network monkeys displayed motor skills, and networked rats performed computations.

"That’s right. They made a botnet out of brains."

"To build the monkey network, Nicolelis’ team first implanted electrodes in rhesus macaque brains, positioned to pick up signals from a few hundred neurons. Then they connected two or three of the macaques to a computer with a display showing a CG monkey arm. The monkeys were supposed to control the arm, directing it toward a target like a boat crew rows forward. When the monkeys got the arm to hit the target, the researchers rewarded them with juice. (“Each monkey had different juice preference,” says Nicolelis. “We had to do a preference test beforehand.”) To be clear, the monkeys don’t think “move my arm” and the arm moves—they learn what kind of thinking makes the arm move and keep doing that—because monkeys love juice.

"The rat study was even weirder. For this one, the neuroscientists directly wired four rats’ brains together—using the implants to both collect and transmit information about neural activity—so one rat that responded to touch, for example, could pass on their knowledge of that stimulus to another rat. Then the researchers set the rats to a bunch of different abstract tasks—guessing whether it might rain from temperature and air pressure data, for example, or telling the difference between different kinds of touch-stimuli. The brain collectives always did at least as well on those tests as an individual rat would have, and sometimes even better. And in a successful effort to squidge people out, the researchers called these rat-borg collectives “organic computers” or, even worse, “brainets.”"

Animal brains connected up to make mind-melded computer
New Scientist, July 2015

Building an organic computing device with multiple interconnected brains
Nature

Computing Arm Movements with a Monkey Brainet
Nature

Mass Transference Device

Note to the Reader

In this story, humanity is headed for an end point, like the Big Bang, but in reverse, and for humans only. Humanity can avoid this moment of absolute concentration (or do they only speed its advance) by replacing “themselves” in the world with their self-replicates, and then by themselves going backwards through the trajectory of progress. From that point on, humans “progress backwards”, becoming less and less reliant on technology and approaching the original collective consciousness we were all part of before we became individuals (which is not much different than the anthroposphere concept of our future, as presented in the story, only it would be happening in reverse).

This transition is especially difficult because humans, by approximately the year 2070 will have bred out of themselves the ability to live without their anthropospheric bubble. They need, somehow, to breed back into their race, the ability to live like they used to (in the days of the early 21^st century).

It is the written thought of his ancestors that Hassam Flessihfo uses to help him make this backwards transition. Together with his partner he passes on his reformed “genes” to his son Samm Ashcroftt, who in turn becomes the first human born with the ability to survive in complete independence of the anthroposphere.

But, it is the “genetic code” of the author himself, being manipulated through the very act of writing the book, that begins the chain reaction allowing Hassam to leave the collective human network in the first place. And it is the poem that has already been buried in the ground that will give him the wisdom to succeed. This is a story about a future which is actually created by the author himself, in real space, in real time.

There are intricacies, such as the use of time travel to extract materials from an earth in the past and bringing them backwards through time to the present, hence bringing with them surplus time-energy used by the materials to create themselves. There are speculations as to the fate of our social structure in the face of ultimate technological convergence. There are strange, fantastical scenes of life outside the sphere which encompasses human existence, where people have to revert back to the struggle against gravity – a force which has been, naturally, deselected by the people of the future.

This story also consists of journal records kept by the author. Many of the passages herein, upon which the story is built, are not, in fact, fiction (in that they were not intentionally written for this story). They are true struggles of a person trying to cope with the inadequacies of the human race, and the mysteriousness of one’s personal vision in life.

One of the basic premises of this book is that, in the future, time does not exist, and so it makes no difference that this story is being written now, but experienced in real life at some point in the future. The story and the actual events are one and the same. The very fact that it is being written is proof enough that it already exists. Even if it exists only in the form of written thought, that thought can be inspired by someone in the future, changing the way they think. Do people change the world, or do thoughts change the world? In this case, it is both, and any contradiction has been (successfully or unsuccessfully, it is yet to be judged) designed out of the authored system.

In this projected existence, people will lose their ability to create their own world. They will be given false choices that present the illusion of being creator. This, it can be argued, is already happening, even, and especially, in the midst of the cooperative/collaborative spirit of this early 21^st century. It can be argued that we cooperate not for ourselves, but for the Greater Good, thereby losing sight of our own personal vision, which, in turn, is essential for the persistence of the collective. Without the self-sustaining strength of the individual, the collective falls apart, or in the case of this story, it collapses into itself, into non-existence, swallowed up by the vast nothingness of the universe – a universe once inhabited by humans, but now no more. We must not lose our ability to create our own world. This story is simply a reference, an example, of how one goes about doing this.

This is not science fiction. Neither is it based in religion, or philosophy, and it is not about a futuristic vision of the world. This story is about reconnecting, or just maintaining connection, with the Earth, the Universe, and the mystery of Life. This story is about the indisputably most pressing struggle of our time, or of any time, as long as we are human. This story is of the struggle for self-actualization.

READ:

http://www.scribd.com/selfreplicate

Activation

The Mass Transference Device has been Activated..

http://www.scribd.com/selfreplicate

Network Address

A note to the reader, or to those at least who are looking to understand this.

The tag “Mass Transference Device” is a reference to a book, still being written, by the same title. Log entries tagged with this name are excerpts from the book. It is, or seems to be, understood by the author, that all of these things, excerpts and entries alike, are stand-alone, and can thus be understood in either context, those being that of the book itself, or that of a single entry, a single point or idea.

The relationship between log entry and book excerpt (entry as individual, stand-alone; and excerpt as part of a whole, part of a larger idea) is one yet to be fully understood by the author, and so, if any confusion as to the lineage of causation emerges, it is being noted here at least some basic explanation. But, as from confusion emerges clarity, so from clarity contradiction. We end up only facing once again, confusion.

One of the overall purposes, it seems, of this all, both the book and the log entries, is to facilitate the development of a resistance to sustained confusion, thus yielding…something…

Comments are welcome.

Fortunately or Unfortunately

It has been decided.

The recent increase in the use of the words ‘fortunately’ and ‘unfortunately’ signals a shift in the collective paradigm. In using this new relationship between the diametrically opposed terms as a way of describing an event, there is a distinction between chance and causation. When a certain outcome or mode of behavior or operation is categorized as ‘fortunate’, it denies causation and, hence, renders the operation incapable of being rationalized.

To refer to anything as fortunate renders the logical human mind powerless to analyze it, manipulate it, predict its outcome, or prevent its onset. It exists entirely in another realm as a function of randomness.

So, in the current collective paradigm, instead of referring to something as a problem that can be solved, it is instead a phenomenon, the true nature of which we can not understand by way of the rational mind.

When certain political or social issues are not recognized as a problem, then there is no fault, and there is no need for direct action. Surely, this seems like a most unfortunate context in which to address major issues of our time. However, fortune, by its illogical nature, removes the moral compass, the universal right-and-wrong. And in this vacancy, perhaps, there is room for a recalibrating of that compass. All of the sudden, the fortune now becomes ours for the taking, for those of us who wish to see it in this way.

[note a contemporary article relating to this subject]

Candidates for "Genius" tech support staff undergo more training in facilities world-wide, then are certified and regularly tested on their skills. Training extends even to language. Former Geniuses say they were told to say "as it turns out" rather than "unfortunately" to sound less negative when they are unable to solve a tech problem. People familiar with the matter say Genius appointments are often triple booked, so they are always swamped.

Secrets From Apple's Genius Bar: Full Loyalty, No Negativity

By YUKARI IWATANI KANE And IAN SHERR, JUNE 15, 2011

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304563104576364071955678908.html

Nothing to See Here

When you think about life, when you used to see the buds of the acorn, and then the acorn – the little triangular pieces thrusting upwards, outwards, overlapping in a distinct pattern. And you could see the relationship; when you would think about the on-off switches, set by infinite variables, you would bask in the glory of it, the glory of life.

Then came the code, and it was like, oh, it’s just a code. Nothing to see here. That’s when we realized that life wasn’t about biology, but information. All of our concepts of life and its behaviors were now being conferred upon information, not matter, as its substrate.

The virtual palimpsest was a paradox at first. Copies upon copies of copies, pieces taken apart and put back together but having been exchanged with identical pieces of another. Put simply, though, it was just the concept of a thing – a thing as based in matter – becoming a non-physical thing, an idea. There were no more things, or at least not much that mattered. It was all ideas. And ideas don’t require a physical platform, they need only a mindspace.

How do you build a culture on that? There is no more ‘building’ in the sense we of timespace had known. And so our cultures as well dissolved and diluted, too meager an entity to compete in this world. Culture needs layers of age and decay; it mimics the biological even in that sense of growth-from-poverty. To the point, he who relies on his body to house his mind, his mind will always behave as a body and according to the rules of timespace.

On the Self-Replicate

[Sunday February 13, 2011]

People no longer interact in the way they were designed to by their physical evolution. During the transition from physical evolution to mental, the human body ceased to evolve (by its naturally selective definition), experiencing instead a change in mental constructs and eventually in collective interaction. Having developed the self-replicate, people could experience omni-spatial presence. They work while, at the same time, playing. The total separation of self into multiple entities allowed for unimaginable developments in energy use, while at the same time encouraging interpersonal interaction to increase to the point of full integration. Everyone can interact with everyone else all the time, at the same time – in fact, outside time. Experience, in a way, is shared rather than lived, in the ancient sense of the word.

This great system of human life is managed by the Exogenerational Body. This limited group is responsible for the maintenance of our collective life form. They redesign the anthropic network and redistribute its nodes as necessary. They also create vast diversions for the spiritual health of the people. Collectively, these diversions are called The Illusion. While many self-replicates perform the work necessary to uphold our way of life, others can at the same time commune in the warmth of their own chosen groups of conscious entities. The composite of all one’s choices within and between these networks and throughout all of one’s self replicates, is called one’s life – the people you’ve met, the things you’ve done, all of those are offered to you and either acquired or non-preferred, attracted or repelled. Technically, there are no new experiences offered within this illusion, only shared experiences endlessly redistributed. People come and go, in unifying cycles called Generations, but their self-replicates will always be bound within the anthroposphere, sharing the Great Experience. The only difference is that choice is not available – there is no acquisition or non-preference – existence simply sways to and fro throughout the sphere, riding on the currents of the universe that have been focused by the collective purpose of humankind.

The Anthroposphere

[Sunday, February 20, 2011]

Around the year 2000, humans began their exploration into the use of a digital network of interaction. Within 10 years, all humans existed simultaneously in both the conventional world and the digital world. This was, as stated, mostly exploratory in its developments. Humans had never experienced the simultaneity that came from the digital network, but soon, the entire spacetime structure of their collective existence became surmounted by a mind-shattering theory of non-time, which was itself brought on by developments in energy use, distribution, and storage of the early 21^st century.

When, in 2040, humans, collectively, in a sense, formed the anthroposphere, non-time began, paving the way for the self-replicate. Human existence, from that point on, is categorized into two parts – before the anthroposphere, or in time; and after the anthroposphere, or outside time.

Once the anthroposphere was officially stabilized, all living humans were grouped, by age, among other less important variables, into Generations. These are the Generations proper, as the Proto-Generations refer to the population born in time. Shortly before the first of the protogenerational population was set to expire, it was discovered that they could continue to exist within the anthroposphere as virtual entities. Though the expired generations could no longer interact, their presence could be felt by others still living. Henceforth, all humans living and otherwise have gained access to the self replicate, a virtual entity that can exist simultaneously with the living human, while technically interacting at another geochronological position. The only difference between the self-replicate of the living and those of the expired, is that expired self-replicates are more like the phantoms, or ghosts recorded in the old stories of human memory.

By around the year 2040, all humans being born were done so into the anthrocentric world of the human network. Humans had come full circle by this time, so that, by the modified evolutionary product of human conjoinment, their offspring was designed to interact within the anthroposphere only. The social engineering apparatus was thus complete, and, by 2070, the whole of human existence, active and extinguished, could be safely controlled.

The Illusion

[Thursday, February 10, 2011]

It is the year 2100. The world is in flux. Large numbers of people are being redistributed, both by choice and by the manipulation of the vast social engineering apparatus, or, as those who know call it – The Illusion. There are those who live outside the illusion and those who live inside. Cultures are designed. Long ago, cultures were fermented over time. Now, time does not exist, at least in that sense.

In the illusion things don’t progress in a simple trajectory, they don’t ebb and flow like the tides. Instead, this life is a repetition of the same thing over and over. The façade changes, tastes change, neighborhoods and relationships change, but they do so only to uphold the illusion of the passing of time. Beyond the façade, the system remains in a state of static equilibrium. No revolutions, no triumph. No hindsight, no dreams. People experience conflict, but only that which is designed as such. True conflict does not exist. The fluctuation of reality, of Activity versus Dormancy, Aggression versus Cooperation, Love versus Hate, and Right versus Wrong, as they push and pull on the path of time, have been reduced to an unwavering horizontal line. All life continues unchanged by the unfolding of events.

But this is not life. Everyone knows this. Everyone knows that we must see night and day in order to maintain mental stability. Everyone knows that we must slumber and awaken to maintain physical cohesion. Just as this is known, so it is for the vicissitudes of life. For this reason, it is engineered into the daily ongoings of the life of the submitting population.

In a sense, they choose to live this way. They understand the necessity for cyclical change and submit to the illusions that have been so thoughtfully articulated for their well-being. It is not blissful paradise, though some choose a more seductive version of the illusion. It is not base destitution, though some are cunningly diverted into the upper realms of poverty. For the most part, it is life as usual. Unthinkable crime and horror have been minimized, though with it, unforeseeable epiphanies and ecstasy. That is not to say that these do not exist, just that they are managed, controlled. Ultimately, they, none of them, ever happen. Nothing happens. Plants grow, wind blows, and insects crawl in crooked lines, but all of this has been arranged. This has all been done for the betterment of humankind, for the Greater Good.

Now, there are some who deny the illusion. That is not to say that they deny one illusion for another, as most do – that is, in itself, a false choice. But no, these others, they live, painfully, in the Constant Now. This Now does not supply spirit-nourishing change. Love is not made stronger by the vanquishing of hate. Silence does not exist, for there is no unrest. These others, they choose this life, this non-life, again and again, moment after moment, in a battle of self preservation vs. self destruction.

Life outside the illusion is not long. Those who walk away face hardships for which the coping mechanisms required have been bred out of them for generations. Those who turn their backs also lose their connectivity to the anthroposphere, the collective will to live that people propagate amongst themselves and which is the fuel that propels human life through the barrier of time and into the future.

These are those who orbit the anthroposphere, who surround it in a web of purpose supported only by their own belief in an underlying force – a threat. They claim to feel its danger, to see its light coming on the horizon. They are dismissed. “They feel too much”, it is said. They are known to travel throughout space in the way memories slide through our minds. The population at large is told to stay away from them, both physically and mentally, for they creep. They create thought, but not full thoughts as we are used to – fragmented thoughts, half-thoughts that require another human like themselves to come together into a fully formed idea, but at the risk of remaining forever unfinished and unanswered. Their creeping thoughts represent a bubble rising to the surface, bursting and rippling its wake outwards to crash on the shores of the collective consciousness. They are disruptive.

Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do about them at this time. They disrupt our way of life and their numbers grow with the passing of the days, more creeping, feeling, thinking people. They leave us because they are afraid, and they make us afraid.