Artificial and Human Intelligence with Digital Twins
Human intelligence has been creating and
maintaining complex systems since the
beginnings of civilizations. One long-lived
example is the Qanat in Gonabad, Iran,
which was created 2,700 years ago and still
provides drinking and agricultural water for
around 40,000 people today. 1 In modern
times, digital twins have emerged to aid
operations of complex systems, as well as
improve design and production. In parallel,
both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and eXtended
Reality (XR)—including Augmented Reality
(AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)—have emerged
as tools that can help manage the operations
of complex systems. This article explores
how digital twins can be enhanced with AI
and how emerging UI technologies like XR
can improve people’s abilities to manage
complex systems via digital twins.
Digital twins can marry human and artificial
intelligence to produce something far
greater by creating a usable representation
of complex systems. End users do not need
to worry about the formulas that go into
machine learning, predictive modeling and
artificially intelligent systems but can
nonetheless capitalize on their power as an
extension of their own knowledge and
abilities. Digital twins combined with AR, VR
and related technologies provide a
framework to overlay intelligent decision
making into day-to-day operations, as
shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: A digital twin enhanced with AI and Intelligent Realities
1
P. English, "The Origin and Spread of Qanats in the Old World". Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Society. JSTOR. 112 (3): 170–181. JSTOR 986162. June 21, 1968.
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November 2019