Who’s afraid of the big, bad AI?

I haven’t written for a while and need to get the routine going again, to keep the flow. I haven’t done it for the scarcity of impressions, but somehow for lack of time, I felt. Having thought about it then, I realised that I have literally had more time now, than say, a year ago, when our daughter was in her last school year. So what happened? Where did the time go? Travel? Not more than usual. Household chores? Less than ever with everyone out of the house most of the time. Family? Ditto. What else is there that eats up time? And what is time anyway?

People think time exists. It must be there even if we cannot get hold of it. Maybe it is because it is not there at all? Astrophysicist Adam Frank says Isaac Newton thought of time as a river flowing at the same rate everywhere. A lineal movement that just trickles away. Einstein changed this picture by unifying space and time into a single 4-D entity. But even Einstein failed to challenge the concept of time as a measure of change. Adam Frank sees it as a collection of "Nows", activated by change. Can the trajectory of this change move spirally, like the universe, a fact that was known to the ancients for millennia, but was discovered/calculated by modern science as recently as last year? It was recorded in history as a "Serpent" metaphor and keeps popping up in the sacred literature of many religions.

I am more interested in how this phenomenon perceived by different people I know, compared with how they deal with it. Elderly people often say, at some point they begin to feel that time moves faster as one gets older. It is certainly the case with me. Hardly do I wake up, it's already evening, and another day is gone without a trace, with so many things left undone. Important things. Thoughts unthought. Important issues unresolved. People unspoken with, about topics of substance to me. And so the pile on the "To Do" side gets higher every day, and every morning I start at the beginning, knowing this is how this day will end as well. A whirlwind of a kind, or a serpent if you like.

A friend of mine is different. For her, time moves in slow motion loops. She is an early riser. When she wakes up, she is immediately inundated with a flurry of ideas, thought-images, all of which need to be thought through properly, one at a time (she is an engineer). As they are many, they move orderly through this loop, a process that can sometimes blur her perception of when a certain occurrence took place. A particular occasion, for example, may have occurred yesterday, or a week, or a month ago, difficult to gage. She knows it has taken place, was thought through, organised and enacted upon, but not exactly when. Which is not of concern in today's age of every activity being recorded digitally.

My husband just doesn't know what time is. Not what time it is (well, in a sense too), but what this concept is for. He moves through it like a tank with an agenda. With a list of responsibilities and duties, and his time is measured by the ticks he can make under each accomplished task. He owns a nice watch I gave him for his birthday he never wears for lack of need. It makes no difference what time it is, if there are still things to be done.

Then there are nine to five people who are painfully aware of the fact that it is 5:55 pm, and you just walked into their office. Their holidays are booked a year in advance. You know to never call them at 6 pm because their dinner is on the table, or at 10 pm, because they are already in bed. I am sure that time ticks differently for these people and if you take their clock away, they will still somehow know that it's time to wake up because it's 7 am.

So what is time? Is it a legitimate measure and not some artificially created human commodity, worth of which was agreed upon for convenience, much like value of money or measurements of length? How is it that we can just move away from times designated by nature for activity or rest (night and day) by just clicking a light switch? What does this ability do to us as species and is it good for us to be able to spend more time in a waking phase? It is certainly more efficient, as we can do more - work more, play more. Or does it make us sick? Does it fill us with anxieties for not fulfilling our growing duties, not achieving as much as we could, if we slept less?

I have always loved history as a subject. A redundant subject, most say. I bid to differ. I feel it gives you space in observation cabin, where you learn that progress doesn't always mean things get better. Early societies functioned from sunrise to sunset. There is no record that these societies developed better or were healthier, but one thing was for sure - everyone had their place in these societies, where things were happening like clockwork, with some decisions taken away from them. No kid had to be faced with the problem of choosing what he will become. It may have been a death of many a prominent mind (or a nightmare for an inept offspring of a brilliant scientist), but the ones that had the opportunity to develop, had the leisure reserved for thinking, among other things one could hone to perfection. These fortunate, using the freedom from time pressure, developed the idea that time was a moveable image of eternity. Heidegger argued that this idea can only be intelligible if you have eternity as a point of departure, and so it is flawed. He felt that time finds its meaning at death. Can we take the thought of our finitude as springing point of our understanding of time? Do we want to? Do we ever think of it in these terms when we are young?

Not likely. Still, the anxieties connected with lack of time are very real today. In fact, compared with angst - ridden millenials, for whom having a therapist is a status symbol, or today's generation of totally disoriented teenagers, faced with so many choices that they give up and retreat, the ancients were doing well. In the meantime, the great minds like Stephen Hawking warn of times, when AI will take over the world. Given that we already don't have the time to enjoy our cup of tea, what human being can deal with the world that is moving so fast, that we need to remind ourselves to slow down or get sick? We do what we can to stop the clock: meditation at workplace, mindfulness seminars, Vipassana courses. We count steps, learn to breath rhythmically and invest in clocks that dim to imitate the sunrise or sunset to repair our inner broken self. Only, we do all of this to further increase our efficiency level, motivation and ability to deal with stress and anxieties, caused by this very same manipulation we used to extend our time in the first place. All without losing a thought about mortality, sticking to illusion of being able to do it for eternity.

So why be afraid of the bad AI? In my humble opinion it is the only way to beat this continuum. Just get rid of human weaknesses and hug the up and coming brave new world. Let the better man (machine) win. It can do everything better, especially thinking logically, counting, problem solving. It will most probably not be sexist, rude, racist or nervous when pressed for time, because this most mystical commodity will not be an issue to a potentially immortal being. If you can't beat them - join them.