Let’s explore the idea of having multiple doppelgangers that can interact among themselves. To simplify, I’ll frame this chapter within the context of an organisational structure, but it could also apply to a personal family or community environment.

Envision a digital brain at the heart of an organisation, where digital doppelgangers are interlinked, enabling them to communicate and collaborate seamlessly. This setup mirrors the collaborative dynamics of human-driven organisational structures, where individuals work together towards common goals. The integration of digital doppelgangers in such a manner facilitates a significant leap in both productivity and the overall user experience by streamlining cross-functional coordination.

Imagine digital doppelgangers, each specialised in different domains or functions, exchanging information, analysing data and making decisions in real-time. This accelerates the pace at which tasks are completed and enhances the accuracy and quality of outcomes. The collective intelligence of a network of digital doppelgangers could identify patterns, solve problems and innovate in ways that mimic the collaborative efforts of a highly efficient, interconnected human workforce.

Such a digital ecosystem could transform organisational processes, making them more agile, responsive, and capable of addressing complex challenges through automated, intelligent collaboration. This concept extends beyond mere automation; it represents a paradigm shift in how tasks are approached and executed within organisations. It promises a future where digital collaboration and human ingenuity converge to unlock unprecedented levels of efficiency and innovation whilst all being there to assist their human counterpart.

Example – Derek’s Holiday

Derek is an employee eager to plan a holiday. Traditionally, this endeavour would involve a cumbersome process of liaising with multiple departments: HR for his holiday allowance, his manager for approval, and possibly the resource planning team to ensure his absence wouldn’t disrupt ongoing projects. Enter the digital brain, where Derek’s request becomes a seamless task managed by interconnected digital doppelgangers. Derek initiates his holiday plan by instructing his assistive digital doppelganger. This assistant is the orchestrator, facilitating all subsequent interactions among the relevant digital entities. The process unfolds as follows: Derek’s assistant doppelganger first consults with the HR doppelganger to ascertain Derek’s available holiday time, considering factors like company policy, tenure, and previous leave records. With this information, Derek’s personal doppelganger collaborates with Derek’s work-specific doppelganger to pinpoint an optimal 10-day slot within the next six weeks, considering current projects and resource allocations. Following identifying potential dates, the work doppelganger seeks formal approval from Derek’s manager’s digital doppelganger. Once the manager’s doppelganger greenlights the dates, it signals the HR doppelganger to officially earmark the chosen days as holiday time in the company calendar and system. In the final step, Derek’s doppelganger arranges the actual holiday logistics, such as flights and accommodations, before confirming the successful booking with Derek. Throughout this entire procedure, Derek’s involvement is minimal and hassle-free. He simply makes the initial request and awaits confirmations while the digital doppelgangers autonomously navigate the intricacies of inter-departmental coordination. This digital delegation streamlines the process and ensures that all human stakeholders are minimally burdened, transforming what was once a logistical headache into a straightforward, automated operation.

With this foundation, adding new doppelgangers and enhancing existing ones multiplies the digital brain’s collective wisdom. More enterprise knowledge can be digitally represented and connected. As the digital brain grows, it can automate an increasing portion of complex inter-departmental workflows. While a key benefit of the digital brain is minimising human involvement, some oversight and approvals may still be needed in organisational settings.

When Derek requests holiday time, his manager’s digital doppelganger processes the request automatically, adhering to predefined criteria. However, when a manager prefers to oversee holiday applications personally, the manager’s digital doppelganger adopts a different strategy. Instead of immediate approval, it accumulates all incoming holiday requests over a specified period - daily or weekly. The manager’s doppelganger then compiles these requests for the manager’s examination at a predetermined review time, such as every Friday at 2pm.

By understanding the manager’s preference for direct human involvement, the doppelganger communicates with other doppelgangers submitting requests that there is a wait time as human intervention is required. This method marries the efficiency of automation with the necessity of human oversight, ensuring that the process remains streamlined yet respects the manager’s desire for personal input. The digital doppelganger acts as an intermediary, performing the preliminary organising and scheduling tasks facilitating a smooth integration of automated processes with moments of critical human judgement.

Looking beyond Derek’s holiday example, this collaborative digital brain approach can transform operations across many business functions:

Sales doppelgangers could coordinate pricing and quoting across product catalogues, customer accounts, and regional guidelines to generate optimised proposals automatically.
Support doppelgangers could diagnose issues, identify solutions and suggest configuration changes across interconnected systems and devices.
Finance doppelgangers could coordinate budgeting, planning, reporting and auditing processes across departments and operating entities.
Supply chain doppelgangers could optimise logistics, inventory and manufacturing operations across suppliers, facilities and distribution channels.

The concept of a collective digital brain significantly enhances an organisation’s ability to execute tasks with unparalleled speed, scale, and complexity, all while minimising the need for human intervention. This advanced system facilitates a level of efficiency and automation that far surpasses the capabilities of individual operations.

A distinguishing feature that sets the digital brain apart from a mere assembly of doppelgangers is its robust security and access control framework. As previously discussed, each doppelganger is part of an ownership hierarchy, ultimately linked to a human individual or a legal entity such as an organisation, thus ensuring clear accountability. Within this structure, a doppelganger belonging to a specific digital brain is inherently restricted from interacting with doppelgangers outside its designated network. For instance, in the case of Derek planning his holiday, his personal doppelganger, which is not part of his employer, ABC Inc.’s digital brain, would typically be barred from communicating directly with ABC’s internal doppelgangers, such as those handling HR matters.

However, exceptions can be made through a mechanism known as the Doppelganger Security Exchange (DSE). This protocol functions similarly to how one might use their Google or Apple account to log into various services, with permissions being requested and granted for specific types of information exchange. Through the DSE, Derek’s doppelganger was authorised to interact with his work doppelganger, facilitating a secure exchange of relevant personal and organisational information. This controlled access ensures that personal and professional doppelgangers can securely share necessary information, respecting privacy and organisational protocols.

This security and access control mechanism is vital for maintaining the integrity of the digital brain’s network. It allows for a seamless yet secure flow of information and requests within the network, safeguarding against unauthorised access and ensuring that each request reaches its intended destination efficiently. When a doppelganger encounters a request it is unable to process, or it is unaware of how to resolve, it can “shout” within the network for assistance, leveraging the collective intelligence and resources of the digital brain to find a solution, all within a secure and controlled environment.

Shouting

The concept of “shouting” enables a doppelganger to disseminate a request broadly, targeting either the entire digital brain network or a specific subgroup of doppelgangers within that ecosystem. This mechanism is designed to leverage the collective knowledge and capabilities of the network efficiently.

For instance, a doppelganger inquiring about the optimal source for information on an employee’s holiday allowance might use a shout to phrase its query as, “Where is the best place to find out about an employee’s holiday allowance?”

Upon issuing this shout, any doppelganger within the network who perceives the request can respond. The potential respondents include:

Providing the direct answer if they have the information
Suggesting which other doppelganger to ask instead
Proposing a reframed version of the question

If a doppelganger cannot provide any helpful response, it simply won’t reply to the shout. This allows information-seeking and problem-solving to happen collectively across the digital brain, and newly formed or acquired doppelgangers brought into the digital brain can quickly understand the network and what is accessible.

While the examples here focus on organisational use cases, digital brains are not limited to businesses. A family, club or any group could create a network of digital doppelgangers as a digital brain. The digital brain’s applicability is limited only by our creativity in identifying useful applications across all areas of life.

Human Interaction

For too long, technology has been shrouded in cryptic codes and manuals accessible only to experts. This imposed barriers for the average person to harness technological capabilities. Doppelgangers allow anyone to engage with technology conversationally, using nothing more than their native tongue. Chatting with doppelgangers allows you to direct technology to enhance your creativity, productivity and innovation without technical expertise.

Teachers could collaborate with their teaching doppelgangers to design more engaging and adaptive lesson plans. A nurse could access patient records by simply asking their medical doppelganger. A parent could effortlessly manage complex household budgets by describing their needs to their personal finance doppelganger.

This shift liberates human potential by removing the prerequisite of programming or technical knowledge. One no longer needs to study complex coding languages or memorise software syntax. The interface is natural language itself. Technology is adapting to human intuition rather than humans adapting to technology’s constraints.

This doesn’t make the technical skill obsolete for technologists but allows them to focus on advancing the most complex capabilities of AI and doppelgangers. The technologist’s work enables wider democratisation of technology’s benefits through more intelligible and accessible user experiences.

By making technology seamlessly conversational, humans gain a new lever to amplify their abilities and shape their realities. The possibilities are as boundless as the human imagination. With doppelgangers transforming technology into our helpful digital allies.

Digital Brain

Shouting

Human Interaction