Your Digital Entourage Might Save Your Life or Find Your Next Business Connection

For 100 days, tech reporter Victoria Song tried a digital health twin from a service called Twin Health. The service included devices, an app and a suite of habits that encourages you to keep your digital twin up to date on all the things you do, eat and drink in the real world. Sometimes it can do that automatically too. In return, the digital twin offers a visualization of exactly what you should do based on your behavior to maintain or optimize your health.

My digital twin isn’t so much a robotic clone as it is an AI-powered, color-coded food database that predicts how my glucose levels will react to everything I eat. Red is not so good. Orange is so-so. Green is ideal. It’s built based on the data I feed it, as well as data collected from a continuous glucose monitor.

Cheerios for breakfast? No problem, just walk an extra ten minutes right after to equalize your blood sugar. Motivation, habit formation (and retention) and actual health results are all being reported by those who are trying the technology. This is described by some as “metabolic coaching” - like an on-demand nutritionist who already understands your body chemistry and can predict with decent accuracy exactly what eating certain foods or at certain times is likely to do. In the future, experts hope this sort of metabolic twin might also help predict the effects of some types of medication without having to use your own body for testing.

Last week I also saw an engaging video of people actively wading through polluted rivers cleaning garbage along with a caption asking why we have robots making music or running races instead of figuring out how to do this job instead of people. Similarly, if we can make digital twins that can work pervasively in the background under our control to help us get or stay healthy, why not spend more time creating that instead of trying to digitize the likeness of Hollywood personalities to “act” in their place?

Our digital entourage may be able to do more than just track our health, though. Consider the recent story of the tech founders who gathered their AI agents to have a dinner party and to make social or business connections together simultaneously while their human counterparts were aiming to do the same next door. This is one version of the future, where we will all show up everywhere with our digital entourage in tow ready to make the healthy choices we can’t and create the connections we don’t.

I wonder how many of us would welcome that and how many would avoid it?