Digital twins -- or digislaves?

“C’est par mon ordre et pour le bien de l’Etat que le porteur du present a fait ce qu’il a fait.” (The bearer of this letter has acted on my order and for the good of the state.)

In Alexandre Dumas’ novel The Three Musketeers, Cardinal Richelieu gave Milady de Winter a warrant in the wording above, to cover various misdeeds. But the musketeers got hold of the letter and had the executioner of Lille take milady’s head off instead.

Taavi Kotka, in a piece published yesterday on Delfi (why public debate needs to sit behind a paywall is beyond me, but never mind that), floated an idea that’s already a bit better than an earlier one written together with Markus Villig, Sten Tamkivi and Kaspar Korjus – the plan, forcefully shopped to the international press by the PM’s office, to make Estonia the first country to give AI agents their own identity codes.

The new plan is to give people who want one a supplementary identity code, which they could “lend” to their AI agents and use to tell banks and other firms and institutions what the bearer of that code may do on their behalf. Much the same as I can authorise my accountant to make transfers from my (company) account.

Giving supplementary identity codes to people, not to their agents, is something I’ve said before – digislaves need collars, not passports.

But here’s a nuance.

If I don’t set an upper limit on transfers made under such an authorisation, and my accountant turns out to be an idiot or a crook, or some bad actor gets their claws on the warrant, it’ll go the way it did with the Estonian Artists’ Association. Or the way it went for Cardinal Richelieu, who would gladly have let the musketeers do all manner of nasty things to milady, but… on his order, and for the good of the state. Tough luck, cardinal.

And here’s a second nuance.

However much the PM’s office would like to, this new business plan can’t actually be sold under an “agentic state” or other AI-hype-marketing label. It’s the plainest possible power of attorney. Because it makes no difference whether I lend my “supplementary identity code” to an AI agent, a vibe-coded app, or a professionally built piece of software. Or to an actual human being.

Kotka calls such an agent a “digital twin”; I call it a “digislave”. My term emphasises the agent’s subjection to its master; his gets more PR points.

And a third.

If these supplementary identity codes look like ordinary Estonian identity codes, just starting with a nine (as Kotka proposes in both of his pieces), every system that today validates input purporting to be an identity code will need reworking. That may at first look like far less work than building proper APIs for digislaves, but… if a given system has no mechanism for acting under a (limited) authorisation in the first place, there’s nothing that supplementary identity code can do there anyway.

What I find saddest in this whole circus is that people want a lot of good things, but can’t be bothered to think through how to do it properly.

Originally posted in Estonian on LinkedIn.