Time, Society & Artificial Intelligence
Very little has been discussed about the aspect of time when it comes to A.I., but it could have some profound impacts, good and bad.
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 time is more an internal thing. You have more freedom in which to set your time, but other constraints come along, such as the CEO impinging on your weekend plans. If you’re a blue collar worker in a factory or trade, your time is more governed. And people outside of work know that between certain hours on certain days, you are not available.
Much of how our current capitalist system sees time is still stuck in the thinking of Taylorism over a hundred years ago. Work as a measure of outputs is seen as making widgets. The “widget” in knowledge work is reports, papers, forecasts. This is one of the reasons for the whole Work From Home (WFH) and Return To Office (RTO) debate is so significant today. Management thinks in terms that are over a century old, workers do not.
We have had a productivity paradox ever since information communication technologies (ICT) entered the workplace and society as a whole. The volume of work accelerates and compounds because more can be done. Yes, the world is moving faster.
Our brains are having a hard time keeping up. They’re not designed for handling the speed of change and impacts on our perception and multitude of demands on our time. It is a desynchronization effect. The technologies are moving too fast. It is the desynchronization that impacts governments as well, they are inherently slow and have always been so. This is part of the reason Tech Giants get frustrated with legislators.
We’ve also seen the societal impact of this desynchronizing effect. Increased depression, higher stress levels. Research has shown that those who suffer from depression often feel that time is standing still. We feel isolated in part because we feel overloaded with more connections than we can handle. The loneliness is a temporal rebound effect.
Artificial Intelligence and Time
As AI tools like Generative AI, Machine Learning and Neural Networks advance, like every technology ever invented, there will be good and bad things that happen. If we do figure out how to govern and regulate it, we may develop some frameworks to make AI truly work for us.
AI can be a great augmentation tool. Most of the technologies we’ve invented until recently have been to augment our physical capabilities. AI and other digital technologies augment us cognitively. This is where time really comes into play with AI.
Remember that temporal rebound effect? To date, all information technologies have resulted in this. Every single one. There is no reason to suggest AI will be any different. It is more than likely that AI will end up creating more work for us and in fact, significantly compound our opportunities to do more.
If mundane work can be done by AI, that means humans will have more time to do human things. From creating art and climbing mountains to solving interesting challenges and problems.
One possible and significant benefit may be that we can have time to catch up. This may result in a decrease in depression and current stress levels across society. We may well see changes in how our economic systems work. Management thinking may in fact, catch up to the 21st century and Taylorism thinking may fade away, or at least become more useful.
A risk of course, is that AI is used in a way that enables an elite in society to put more constraints on our time, reducing our free agency and attempting to bring Taylorism back with force. This will be a tension in the near future.
This tension is part of our modern world and is often referred to as dynamic stabilization. Our current economic system of capitalism requires constant growth, a never ending output. This is what lead to the time of the Robber Barons, which is very similar to what we are seeing today. The dynamic is when people push back against this, which was the rise of unions and collective bargaining. Keeping things in a stabilization zone is dynamic. A constant flux.
While AI may help manage this dynamic and temporal rebound, it could exacerbate it. In a future article I’ll look how this dynamic may impact political and economic systems as part of culture.
While there are claims that AI is entirely changing industries, jobs are already being eliminated and that AI does amazing things, most of it is nonsensical hype with absolutely no data to support these claims.
But Generative AI is proving to be useful the more it develops and the more we play with it. It could help us find more time to play and experiment, to think about things, so slow down when we want to and benefit society as a whole. It’s about time.