The technology behind digital twins has expanded to include large items such as buildings, factories and even cities. This also raises new social and ethical issues, such as privacy and property of data, disruption of existing societal structures, inequality and in justice.
Background
A digital twin is a digital copy of the physical world. The technology behind digital twins has expanded to include large items such as buildings, factories and even cities, and some argue people and processes can have digital twins, expanding the concept even further. This twin would enable people to collaborate virtually, intake sensor data and simulate conditions quickly, understand what-if scenarios clearly, predict results more accurately, and output instructions to manipulate the physical world.
The digital twins trend is gaining momentum thanks to rapidly evolving simulation and modeling capabilities, better interoperability and IoT sensors, and more availability of tools and computing infrastructure. This means more organisations would explore opportunities to use digital twins to optimise processes, make data-driven decision in real time, and design new products, services, and business models.
Our story
Challenge
As digital technologies, digital twins raise social and ethical issues, such as algorithmic biases, methodological and value-driven concerns such as inconclusive evidence or unfair outcomes, or issues related to the ownership of the data generated by the digital twin. Furthermore, the fact that using digital twins in the urban planning represent socio-ecological systems requires that this particular context is considered in digital twin development in general, and in the way digital twins may affect our relation to the city, to our communities, and to environment in particular.
The NSW Government recently released its Digital Twin of the Western Sydney City Deal in partnership with CSIRO’s Data61. By aggregating high-value transport, infrastructure, property, planning and environmental datasets directly from the owners, governments and industry, the NSW digital twin aims to ensure all stakeholders are working off the same authoritative data, to effectively respond to different built and natural environments. In this project we review the social and ethical aspects of the digital technology regarding the development of design requirements of NSW digital twin.
