AI + The New Human Frontier

CHAPTER 4The Speeding Up of Time

“Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”

“What?! 40 more minutes? I can't wait that long!”

“Tomorrow?! Tomorrow is forever!!”

That is time through the eyes of my first grader (at the time of writing this book). With the short answers to each of those repetitive questions being: “Nope,” “Yes, you can,” and “Not quite. Let's try that again.” Long, drawn out, laborious. Each day seems to contain its own lifetime when you are young.

Time is an integral part of our daily life, and our perception of it fluctuates with age. It governs the rhythm of our days, dictating when we wake up, eat, work, and rest. The older we get, the more minutes become a smaller fraction of our overall lifetime, so the more quickly we feel them moving forward. We often find ourselves wishing for more time or lamenting its fleeting nature. And our emotions color the way we perceive it, as time becomes intertwined with our experiences and memories. As children, we try to understand the world around us and make sense of the people in it. This may be one reason time moves slower when we are younger.

Time is also experienced linearly—the arrow of time points forward, not back. But even though the fundamental laws of physics do not distinguish between past and future, in our experience, time always points into the future. We still experience reality through linear time. In the agricultural age, we experienced it as unfolding seasons. In the industrial age, we ...