A New Kind of Time?

As anyone who has used any of the new AI apps can testify, there is a moment of disorientation that occurs when one finishes typing a query and the response emerges the very next instant. And not just any response, but a detailed, coherent answer with relevant quotes and data to a complex question.

?It's not that we are unused to computer speeds. We have all been colonised by the digital world to one degree or another and are well aware of its blazing speeds in crunching vast amounts of data. A search engine query gets thousands of answers tumbling our way. But this is different. This isn’t just piles of information being offloaded; this is a real answer.

?For most of human history, time has been measured by effort. The difficulty of a task—writing a book, gathering knowledge, solving a problem—gave time its weight. We experience time as something stretched across labour and learning, its passage marked by the slow accretion of understanding.

?Artificial intelligence disrupts this equation. When something that once took weeks now takes seconds, it’s not just efficiency that changes; the texture of time itself is altered. Thought, which was once an unfolding process, now arrives fully formed. This is disorienting. Human meaning has always been closely tied to the passage of time. Growth, mastery, and depth—each of these requires duration. But what happens when duration is no longer a requirement? If a book that once took a year to write can be outlined in an hour, does the value of the book change?

?Traditionally, we have associated depth with verticality—you start with an idea, work through its complexities, and descend into understanding. AI, however, does something different. Instead of deepening time, it widens it. It lays out multiple possibilities, patterns, and perspectives at once, functioning more like a floodlight than a drill.

?This is a fundamental shift. Human cognition has always moved sequentially, one insight leading to another. AI, on the other hand, processes vast amounts of information simultaneously. It does not move through time in the way we do; it collapses it. What once required laborious intellectual excavation now appears all at once, as if thought has bypassed the need for thinking.

?The result is a sense of temporal dislocation. But while AI compresses production time, it does not necessarily compress comprehension time. The human brain still needs to interpret, absorb, and synthesise, which means that even though time is behaving differently, we are still bound to certain limits.

?Even in a world where AI produces instant answers, time is still needed for context to form, for consequences to unfold, and for wisdom to develop. Wisdom is not just the accumulation of insights; it is the integration of those insights into experience, judgement, and action. That process cannot be bypassed by speed alone.

This paradox plays out in interesting ways. When AI produces a piece of writing, for instance, it often feels uncanny—not necessarily because it lacks intelligence but because it lacks process. It arrives without struggle, without revision, without the friction that makes human thought feel real to us. It skips the steps we associate with effort and understanding.

?One way of making sense of this is that instead of measuring time in terms of duration, we start measuring it in terms of density. Instead of assuming that deep thinking must take time, we could shift to a model where the value of a moment is determined by how much insight, complexity, or transformation it holds. Here, the challenge is not to keep up with AI’s speed but to learn how to navigate the landscape it creates. When an answer appears instantaneously, the task of the human thinker is not to arrive at it but to interpret it—to decide which dimensions to explore, which connections to follow, and what to discard.

?What AI reveals to us is that time is, by itself, not a meaningful idea. Time is what time enables. The human experience of time is purely a function of its abilities. We are not used to thoughts arriving before we have had the chance to think. But a different kind of intelligence shows us that time can have a completely different shape, form, and feeling.

And yet, while we marvel at the speed at which AI gives us answers, there is still some hesitation in using its results. We find it easier to admire AI’s abilities rather than use them, particularly when it comes to subjective areas. We are amazed at AI art, for instance, but we don’t really consider it to be art.

?In some ways, what we value is human effort and the humanity of the experience that goes into any act of creation. Time is a measure of that. In a certain sense, time is friction, the thing that connects intention with output. Without that exertion of effort, the mental grunt that goes into thinking, thought itself has questionable value. This could, of course, change as we get more used to AI, but for now, we still think of time as effort.

(This is a version of an article that has appeared previously in the Times of India)

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