The Model Multiple: On the Political Geographies of Digital Twins

The Model Multiple: On the Political Geographies of Digital Twins

Louise Amoore, Durham University

The practice of so-called "digital twinning" is becoming a significant form of contemporary AI world-making. That is to say, digital twins do not simply deploy AI models in the service of simulating spatialities, but rather they actively remake a spatial politics of, knowledge and action. What is the specific form of simulation we are witnessing with digital twinning and how might we situate it in a longer history of simulation? There are three significant political dimensions and logics of today's digital twins: induction and intervention, prediction and population, and ethics and actions. These logics are present in the spaces and domains I discuss here - the factory, the clinic, and the battlefield.