Research On The Moralization Of Digital Twin Technology

Against the backdrop of the current wave of digitalization,the rapid development of convergence technology has given birth to the concept of Digital Twin.As the General technology promoting the fourth industrial revolution,digital twins are not only applied in the industrial field,but also in urban management and medical care.This technology can achieve its technological goals for the twinning of genomes,engines,individuals,factories,cities,and even Earth and planets,such as improving healthcare,improving agricultural efficiency,improving production system efficiency through predictive maintenance,and improving human safety,actively changing our lives.But at the same time,digital twins also bring many potential risks and moral controversies.This article conducts a systematic study on the moralization of digital twin technology to address the challenges it brings.This article mainly reflects on digital twin technology from the perspectives of technological philosophy and technological ethics,and the idea of technological moralization provides new ideas for solving the ethical issues of digital twin technology.Ultimately,the following four questions emerged:What is a digital twin?What moral controversies does digital twin technology face?How to Resolve the Moral Controversy of Digital Twin Technology?What new problems have arisen in the process of moralizing digital twin technology and how should we respond?The first question is,what is digital twin?The first chapter elaborates on the origin of digital twins from this open question.Perception technologies such as photography,CT,and wearable devices are no longer limited to simulating human vision and hearing,but can also capture and reproduce human olfactory and tactile senses,as well as brain and cardiac waves,thereby increasing the possibility of digital twins in simulating human and world dimensions.However,in the current AI algorithm environment,digital twin technology not only stays in the passionate pursuit of world imitation and the desire for human immortality,but also adds the prediction and persuasion functions for physical entity.In fact,emerging technologies have expanded the connotation and extension of the concept of digital twins,and will also pose challenges to some current social value cognition.The second question is,what moral controversy does digital twin technology face?Compared to the underlying big data technology and artificial intelligence technology of digital twin technology,digital twin technology not only has common issues that are consistent with the underlying technology,but also faces personality issues that are different from other technologies due to its integration.From the perspective of the"structure function" framework representation mode of digital twin technology,the process of digital twin technology can be divided into digital simulation function and algorithm prediction persuasion function.Therefore,this technology faces general ethical issues of data ethics and algorithm ethics,such as privacy security at the data level and unreliable algorithm level.The mutual mapping between physical entity and digital twin in digital twin technology makes digital twin face special problems.First,can digital twin represent physical entity?That is,the agency relationship may cause problems such as identity disputes,the disappearance of subjectivity,forgetting and immortality.Second,how about the mutual control between digital twins and physical entity?The control relationship may lead to issues such as lack of autonomy,fairness and justice,and disputes over ownership.The third question,how to solve the moral controversy of digital twin technology?Firstly,it explains why the concept of technological moralization was chosen to guide the resolution of ethical issues in digital twin technology.The reason for this is that digital twin technology,as an emerging technology,has unfinished nature,while the traditional externalist approach to ethical conventions lags behind.The lack of synchronization between the two allows us to explore new paths.The internalist approach of technological moralization provides a new approach to solving the moral issues of digital twin technology,by incorporating important values into the technological design process,making digital twin technology "ethical".This article compares the value analysis of digital twin technology in social usage scenarios and design scenarios,and points out that the "iterative" approach is a more feasible way to moralize digital twin technology.Finally,three cases of the moralization of digital twin technology are listed.One is the moral design of dynamic informed consent in the Human Genome Project,the second is the technical design of AI system filtering"immoral" content in ChatGPT’s moral review mechanism,and the third is the moral decision of automatic driving technology provides new options for solving the trolley problem through the built-in safety principles.The fourth question is the challenges and response strategies faced by the moralization of digital twin technology?Firstly,the internalist approach to moralization from the design stage faces issues such as disputes over the moral subject of technology,unclear division of responsibilities,and counter regulation and re regulation of technology.The reason is that the post phenomenology analysis approach only focuses on the relationship between "experts-technical artifacts" and "technical artifactsusers",while the social context between "experts-users" is often ignored.Therefore,this paper proposes to adopt multi-dimensional comprehensive ethical assessment methods,multi stakeholder analysis framework,common sense ethics and other ways to moralize technology,and advocate the participation of users and citizens in the process of technology design.However,it is not enough to standardize technical design solely through the internalist path.The moral bottom line of technology should be determined by combining the rule of law,rule of virtue,and other methods of the externalist path,in order to supplement and improve the moralization of digital twin technology.This article systematically analyzes the necessity and feasibility of moralizing digital twin technology,clarifies the limitations of moralizing digital twin technology,and proposes corresponding solutions.Today,with the continuous development of technology,due to the dynamic relationship between emerging technologies and morality,people will never be able to solve the ethical issues of emerging technologies once and for all,and it is destined that ethical governance of emerging technologies is only a temporary governance model.Therefore,we need to re understand the purpose of moralizing emerging technologies.The process of ethical analysis is to enhance moral imagination,and the ultimate goal is to cultivate people’s moral abilities.In life,we should cultivate moral emotions of empathy and conscience to acquire moral abilities in the face of emerging technologies.This article is not only about telling people what to do,but also hoping that people will reflect on the moral life they want.