The language of the rendered world.

Software that can pursue a goal across multiple steps, often by using tools, retrieving information and taking actions with some degree of autonomy.

The selection, ranking or transformation of experience by computational systems between a person and the underlying source.

A hypothetical simulation containing conscious beings modeled on an earlier stage of a civilization’s history.

An economic environment in which organizations compete to capture and monetize limited human attention.

A proposed non-simulated level of reality beneath any simulated worlds. Its existence or accessibility is not established.

Using external tools or environments to reduce internal memory or reasoning demands.

Information about where a digital artifact came from, how it changed and who or what signed those changes.

Synthetic or manipulated media designed to depict a person saying or doing something they did not actually say or do.

A family of ideas proposing that physical reality is fundamentally discrete, informational or computational.

Contact with a person, place, object or event without the primary experience being selected or represented by a digital interface.

Habits that improve how beliefs are formed and updated, including source checking, uncertainty and comparison of explanations.

The view that tools and environments can become functional parts of a cognitive process rather than merely passive aids.

A delay, cost or extra step in a system. Friction can obstruct useful action or protect deliberate choice, depending on context.

The pattern in which a measure becomes less reliable when it is turned into a target and optimized directly.

The question of why physical or functional processes are accompanied by subjective experience—why anything feels like something from the inside.

A deliberately designed set of sources, frequencies and stopping rules for consuming information.

A potential degradation process in which models trained repeatedly on low-quality synthetic outputs lose useful diversity or connection to original data.

A reasoning problem created by the fact that observations are conditioned on the observer existing in a situation where observation is possible.

A broad family of theories in which perception and cognition involve generating predictions and updating them using incoming signals.

The layers between an event and a person’s experience of it: world, sensors, data, models, interfaces, interpretation and action.

A metaphor for the partial world constructed from a person’s perception, language, assumptions and information environment.

A system that predicts which items a user is likely to engage with and ranks or selects them accordingly.

The proposal that our experienced universe may be an artificial simulation created by a more advanced intelligence or process.

The idea that a process such as consciousness could exist in different physical materials if the relevant organization were preserved.

Text, images, audio or video generated or substantially altered by computational systems.

The process of testing whether a claim, identity or artifact is authentic, accurate and properly contextualized.