BY LETTER
Omniscience Simulation
User interface for information retrieval inducing the illusion that the viewer is knowing all the information in a database, and can at any point bring up whatever is needed simply by remembering it. Such simulations does not actually provide the full information, but since the viewer is accessing it as "remembering" (remembrance attempts are interpreted as search-and-presentation requests) the illusion is hard to avoid. This makes omniscience simulations risky to use, since they do not provide the full understanding of the data or patterns in the data, but can easily fool the user into thinking this. Many serious mistakes have been done due to such simulation interfaces. True artificial understanding is provided through the far more expensive gnostic overlays.
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Development Notes
Text by Anders Sandberg
Initially published on 17 December 2001.
Initially published on 17 December 2001.
