Model Employees

For The Drift, Max Hancock reports on digital-twin technology: virtual replicas of physical assets, processes, or systems that sync to their real-world counterparts via sensor data. Though many in tech, business, and manufacturing claim that digital twins promise greater efficiency and productivity, Hancock argues that they mostly benefit the companies investing heavily in the tech; the payoff for workers remains questionable.

The World Economic Forum has said, in a report, that digital twins will bring about “the fourth industrial revolution” — a concept echoed in a 2019 TED talk titled “Sparking the 4th Industrial Revolution by Thinking Spatial.” The first industrial revolution, in the middle of the eighteenth century, gave capitalists steam power and mechanization. The second, at the turn of the twentieth, ushered in electricity and the assembly line, and the third, some seventy years after that, computers. The fourth, apparently, will let middle management play The Sims.