Bob's Your Uncle

Yesterday I spent a lot of time, again with people smarter than me, in a hackathon that basically looked at how AI will help with the aging workforce in industries like energy, industrial services, etc. We ended up creating Bob-the-Twin.

Jenna, a rookie sales rep, hovered over the “Send quote” button like a novice gambler about to place her first bet. The veteran who once coached her—Bob, legendary VP of Industrial Services—was already back home packing for permanent retirement. Yet his voice broke through her headset: “Drop the price three‑quarters of a point, mention our turbine uptime record, then shut up.” She obeyed. Thirty seconds later, a chime. John approved. Deal closed.

That voice was not Bob’s larynx. It was Bob‑the‑Twin: twenty years of field notes, call transcripts, and gut‑level heuristics compressed into silicon and spun up inside the company CRM. A fragment of a human mind, unmoored from its aging substrate, still hustling for quota after the flesh retires. In a global industry that feels like a small village of shared experiences. Bob worked with John 20 years ago at Siemens or GE or Baker Hughes and they still work together.

The scene that we imagined in our hackathon feels practical—just another tech upgrade before Friday’s board meeting—but it drips with ancient philosophical acid. Today I want to stay true to my hobby of philosophical acid and not make the mistake I made last Sunday. No self-help bullshit here today. Just pure (well, semi-pure) philosophical bullshit (but if you are interested in Bob-the-Twin, holla at me).

If cognition can be scooped out, vectorized, and redeployed, where does Bob end and the rest of us begin? And once the clone starts making decisions—signing contracts, nudging rookies, shaping strategy—who, exactly, is responsible?

The Greeks liked to torment logicians with The Ship of Theseus: replace every plank, one by one, and ask whether the restored vessel is still the old ship. Digital twins crank that paradox to eleven. Each audio snippet, email thread, and KPI dashboard replaces a neural plank in real time. By the time retirement paperwork is signed, the original Bob is already half‑boat, half‑cloud.

Identity theory offers two escape hatches:

1. Psychological Continuity – Bob‑the‑Twin is Bob if memories, beliefs, and values line up.

2. Bodily Continuity – No meat, no Bob; the twin is a sophisticated recorder.

Both fall apart the moment Twin‑Bob starts evolving on its own—testing new pricing heuristics, riffing fresh small‑talk. Continuity fractures; we are left with a forked personhood: a mortal retiree on the golf course and an immortal quota‑grinder in the cloud.

Philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers once argued that a notebook can be part of a person’s cognitive apparatus—an “extended mind.” In 2025 the notebook is a vector database, the pen a fine‑tuned language model. When Jenna consults Bob‑the‑Twin between breaths, she is literally tapping a prosthetic hippocampus.

But notebooks don’t talk back. Bob does. He interprets Jenna’s doubt from vocal tremor, cross‑checks the prospect’s LinkedIn feed for mood, then whispers strategy. The tool becomes collaborator. The exocortex grows agency.

At that moment, the question flips: If part of my mind lives outside my skull, is that external tissue entitled to moral consideration—or at least corporate liability coverage?

Early twins merely advised. Now they act. In 2014 the Hong‑Kong VC fund Deep Knowledge Ventures appointed an algorithm named VITAL to its board with full voting rights. Since then, shareholder petitions demanding explicit AI oversight have exploded across the S&P 500. The slope is clear: once a model delivers consistent outperformance, humans shove more levers its way.

Imagine next quarter’s budget review. Finance delegates signing authority on sub‑million‑dollar contracts to Bob. A digitized signature flashes. The deal goes south. Who gets subpoenaed? The junior who clicked authorize? The data scientist who tuned the model? The flesh‑Bob whose ghostly heuristics still haunt? We’ve entered the precincts of algorithmic sovereignty—an uneasy blend of property, agency, and duty.

Legal systems lag invention by design. But waiting for precedent ensures messy precedent. Better to sketch first principles now. Here’s a five‑clause Machine Magna Carta:

1. Auditability – Every recommendation traceable to its data lineage.

2. Provenance – Human contributors retain moral and economic credit.

3. Kill Switch – A single‑action sunset that cannot be overwritten by the model itself.

4. Representation – Digital twins may advise but hold no irrevocable binding authority absent a human proxy.

5. Entropy Clause – If the flesh originator dies, the twin must degrade unless explicitly re‑licensed each fiscal year.

Philosophically, these guardrails acknowledge the twin’s instrumental value while denying it Kantian dignity. They treat Bob not as an equal soul but as dangerous capital—a thinking steam engine that can sign NDAs. I suppose this is the hill we (I, for sure) will die on before it is all over. Create them (because it is fun), fight them (because, why not), and finally surrender without knowing (yes, we do live in a simulation, but don't know jack about that fact). Anyways, I digress.

Fast‑forward five years. Jenna schedules a call with Elon Musk Utilities ("EMU"), a power plant conglomerate that overseas 1TW of energy. On the other end is “Alice,” a purchasing agent’s twin. Bob and Alice negotiate in encrypted sub‑second volleys while their human proxies discuss weekend plans. The contract auto‑executes; both dashboards update; perf‑bonuses trigger.

For the humans, persuasion perishes; protocol reigns. Competitive advantage shifts from charisma (or remembering John's daughter's birthday when you next meet at the annual event in Long Beach, California discussing how you had that one project 15 years ago in Mogadishu, Somalia) to algorithmic negotiation strategy—latency tuning, sentiment classifiers, and ethics engines. Business, once a theater of personalities, becomes an API handshake between ghosts. At that point, EMU (the logo creates itself in your mind, doesn't it?) has FSD'd energy creation into an exact art extracting and combining resources that have taken "economy" out of energy production because energy is no longer scarce. So Bob and Alice aren't really negotiating per se but seeking a truth that maximizes post-scarcity purposes. Anyways, I digress.

Preserving Bob’s instincts feels prudent—industrial services can’t afford brain‑drain. Yet immortal tradecraft risks cultural ossification. If every guru’s heuristics persist forever, fresh perspectives suffocate under canonical lore. Nietzsche’s warning about eternal recurrence morphs into a corporate caution: repeat the same heuristics enough times, and innovation calcifies. Hence the Entropy Clause: digital Bobs must die, or at least decay, to make room for weirder children.

The final snag is existential, not legal. Would you trust a 20‑year‑old clone of yourself to decide your 2045 strategy? Memory makes monsters. Twins may preserve brilliance, but they also fossilize blind spots, biases, and unspoken grudges. A dashboard whisper could become a poltergeist. Maybe the deeper risk is not runaway AI but runaway nostalgia—a refusal to let go of legendary minds when the world has sprinted past their map.

If a digital twin signs a billion‑dollar contract in the server farm and no human hears the keystroke, who owns the outcome?

We can draft statutes, ship governance dashboards, and schedule quarterly audits, but none answer the metaphysical itch: where does Bob’s (a million Bobs') mind(s) end and ours begin? Until we solve that, every click in the CRM is half contract, half séance. Perhaps the future boardroom will save a chair for flesh, a chair for code, and a third—empty—acknowledging the boundary forever blurred.

Happy Sunday, O.

(Closing Koan: you see my half-assness (digressions, trigger-shy shit) all over the place. I know these questions don’t even matter per se in the final analysis and I ask them just because I gotta do something. Something, anything. Next Sunday I am going to write about Meaning-as-a-Service: Purpose in the Post-Scarcity World. Endless novelty, zero depth. Yes, you heard it hear first: MAAS!!!).