Time, Society & Artificial Intelligence
It’s always scarce. We can’t get enough of it and we can’t get it back. One of the less talked about aspects of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is time. How AI might affect not just how we perceive time, but society as a whole, including economics, politics and our sense of self.
Revolutionary technologies have always had an impact on time, from how we manage and perceive it personally through to social status. Always, it has sped things up. It’s been this way since we knocked together some rocks and created stone tools. From bruising our thumbs with stone hammers cramping our thumbs on phone keyboards.
There’s another odd effect of technologies, especially information technologies. We end up with longer to-do lists that can never be completed and are always in a time deficit. An aeroplane means you can travel somewhere faster. This is great. It also means it’s harder to say no to those boring relatives when they beg you to come and visit.
Sociologist Dr. Hartmut Rosa proposes that this can be called a temporal rebound effect. A rather concise way of saying that while technology does save us time, it has a rebound in that it means we can then have more placed on us than we can hope to achieve.
Then there are the social status aspects of time. If you are a knowledge worker in a white collar job, your…
