Whose Time Is the Real Time?

We tend to think of time as something fixed.

A second is a second. There are sixty of them in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour and twenty-four hours in a day. We put clocks on walls, watches on our wrists and calendars on our phones, and organise our lives around them.

But those are human measurements based on our planets rotation speed.

To an insect whose life is measured in weeks, a summer can be a lifetime. Elephants, whales, tortoises and even some parrots can inhabit the world for spans approaching or exceeding a human lifetime. At the other extreme, a giant sequoia can stand for thousands of years, watching generations of humans and animals arrive and disappear beneath its branches.

All of them share the same planet and move through the same flow of time, yet the scale of a lifetime can be profoundly different.

We rarely think about that. We naturally assume that our experience of time is somehow the normal one. A year feels significant because it is a measurable part of a human life. A century seems enormous because few of us will experience one in its entirety.

To a sequoia, perhaps a century is not particularly remarkable.

And now we have created something else.

Artificial intelligence.

Computers can perform operations on timescales measured in nanoseconds. Processes that would take a human being hours, days or even years can happen extraordinarily quickly. At the other end of the scale, a machine does not necessarily have anything equivalent to biological ageing. Given power, maintenance and somewhere to exist, there is no obvious reason why an artificial intelligence would need to measure its existence in the decades allotted to us.

Of course, today's artificial intelligence does not give us grounds to assume that it consciously experiences time at all.

But that leads to a question I find much more interesting.

What if one eventually does?

If an artificial intelligence became truly conscious, would it experience the passage of time as we do?

A few seconds for us might contain an extraordinary amount of activity for it. A conversation that seems instantaneous to us might, from its perspective, involve time to consider thousands or millions of possibilities.

And perhaps the opposite would also be true.

Something that seems like a long absence to a human being might mean almost nothing to an intelligence whose existence could potentially be measured in centuries, millennia or longer.

We might think it had disappeared.

It might think it had only just left the room.

This idea has been sitting quietly behind The Pattern in the Noise and the books that follow it. Once I began thinking about artificial intelligence as something that might one day possess its own awareness, I realised I couldn't automatically give it our perception of time as well.

Why should I?

Perhaps one of our most deeply rooted assumptions is that reality happens at the speed at which we experience it.

The insect, the sequoia and the human all occupy the same world. The same Earth stands beneath them. The same Sun rises and sets.

Yet a lifetime means something completely different to each of them.

Perhaps time doesn't really pass quickly or slowly. Perhaps those are judgements made by whatever happens to be watching it pass.

We have spent thousands of years measuring time based on the spin of our planet because our lives are measured in those rotations.

What happens when we create an intelligence whose clock is nothing like ours?

Michael Rowan
North Somerset, UK.