From Digital Twins to Digital Selves and Beyond - Perspectives for Social Modelling in a Trans-Humanist World

The continuous propagation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques has led to engineering of so-called "humanoid" socio-technical settings, which include mimicking cognitive and social skills. With the advent of cyber-physical systems Digital Twins have become baseline representations of systems integrating cognitive and social behaviour models. When AI components become part of those representations capturing social relations and reflecting on behaviour, they are termed Digital Selves, and require specific development techniques. In this paper, we introduce a Knowledge Management approach to investigate the emergence of socially reflective behaviour like awareness and consciousness in artificial agents. We identify and explain mandatory properties of Digital Selves relevant for modelling digital societies that need to be studied and become part of a transparent and explainable knowledge base for trans-human developments.