Simulating worlds

Some time during the past weekend, I ended up in a rather silly but for me entertaining thought experiment: I was musing about that there should be a way to produce the so called “hindsight bias” in advance of an event. What started as a joking idea quickly led me to some more serious reflections.

The term hindsight bias (according to Wikipedia also called “knew-it-all-along effect”) refers to a cognitive bias which brings people to the belief that the outcome of a certain event or situation was the only logical and possible result. Before the specific event, uncertainty about what happens next is widespread and predictions about the future are varying widely. But in the aftermath people experience a feeling of obvious and overwhelming retroactive predictability of whatever happened. Suddenly, everyone claims to always have expected this very outcome.

If you debate the question of how Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality or self-driving cars will change human life, you can hear plenty of different theories and predictions. However, in 20 or 30 years, people will point out that whatever will have happened after AI, VR and self-driving cars took over, was the one and only logical scenario. Continue Reading