It is Monday. Your “digital twin” warns of an impending heart attack in four weeks and two days and tells you to urgently change your diet and go to the heart clinic. It may have saved your life.
This vision of the future could soon become reality thanks to advances in simulation technology and AI. But what do digital twins mean from an ethical and social perspective? Do they only bring advantages for human beings? What are the drawbacks and implications of this technology both for individual lives and wider society? Matthias Braun, Professor of Social Ethics at the Faculty of Protestant Theology is currently exploring these questions.
Three things combine to make up a digital twin. “Firstly, an individually tailored simulation that secondly, provides real time simulations of the states and modes of operation of buildings, cities and other systems and, more recently, the human body and, thirdly which predicts their future states," says Braun.
Digital twins are designed to perform a range of tasks such as projecting individual health developments on the basis of diet, exercise and genetic markers. They can also serve to generate virtual images of organs, bodily functions and even a whole human body. The projections that they create can be used to predict health risks, the progression of a disease and therapeutic success.
This vision of the future raises many legal and ethical questions. Who owns the data? Who is allowed to make decisions regarding the simulated self? Matthias Braun seeks to address these questions from the standpoint of the ethical concept of the body. Just as with a prosthesis, its owner should have the right to decide what should happen to the digital twin.
Other questions relate to the consequences of the projections made by a digital twin. “How far will people trust their digital twin? Will they change their behavior in light of its assessment? Should there be consequences if they ignore predictions that later turn out to be correct?” asks Braun.
Better stroke therapy with digital twins?
Digital twins could be used to support decisions regarding the treatment of strokes in as little as eight years’ time. The European consortium Gemini (the Latin for twin) has recently been researching this matter. Nineteen institutes under the leadership of the University Hospital Amsterdam have received a Horizon grant worth €10 million from the European Commission to tackle the project. Professor Braun is responsible for conducting research into ethical and regulatory issues.
The researchers initially want to test the treatment for individual stroke patients on their twins. To do this, doctors enter the patient’s medical data, such as blood pressure, heart rhythm and information from their brain scan. Therapies are then simulated on the digital twin to develop an individual treatment.
“If it becomes clear that there are several promising options to choose from, the question this ultimately poses is who should make the decision on the patient’s behalf,” Matthias Braun explains. “We are particularly interested in how much moral and legal agency simulations like these should be given in an emergency. Is the simulation capable of deciding ‘by proxy’ and, if so, should it be allowed to?