Past Time, Real Time, and “Soon Time”

Don’t worry, it’s not your age. Life really does move faster these days.

This is something people have actually said for centuries. Life has moved faster and faster throughout all of human civilization’s history because nearly every tool ever invented, whether chiseled from stone, forged from steel, or laser-engraved in silicon – absolutely every single invention worth anything at all – has been invented to save time.

Time is something no one ever has enough of, so when you save time, you create value. Time is money.

In past times, people noticed the steady march of time and the changes it brought in terms of subtly different social mores and customs. When kings were toppled or new continents explored, it might have taken a century or more to assimilate the implications, but sooner or later new fortunes were made and old social structures evolved. When trade routes or railroad tracks connected previously isolated areas, cultures blended together and new customs arose. Gradually.

But the pace of change has always been accelerating, because the more tools we invent, the easier it is to invent new ones. Technological progress has its own built-in compound-interest rate.

For countless millennia, progress amounted to a mere fraction of a percent per century, if that, but it’s now double digits per year.

What’s different about today is that the pace of change has reached the point that it has become quite noticeable in everyday life. To everyone. You don’t have to be a centenarian to remember tools, technologies, and social customs that are now nearly extinct, from fax machines and film cameras to hand-written checks and eight-hour work days in a physical office.

Despite the incontrovertible fact that we have many more time-saving devices than even our most recent ancestors had, however, the mere availability of all these innovations gives us the perverse illusion that we have less time. After all, we have so many more things we can choose to do today – so many more ways to consume information, or to entertain ourselves, or to accomplish new tasks – that whenever we choose to do anything in particular, we also have to choose not to do a much greater number of other things we’d also like to do. So many Facebook updates, so many product choices, so few hours.

And because we’re under the illusion that time is scarcer than ever, saving time is more valuable than ever. Which is why the term “real time” is so aspirational.

When a business gets real-time customer feedback and insight, or when a consumer accesses their account via their smartphone app to solve a problem in real time – these frictionless experiences are valuable because a “real time” experience actually consumes no time. Literally. A need appears, or a problem arises, and it’s handled. Instantly. In real time. Frictionlessly. You pay your highway toll when the computer recognizes your license plate, in real time. Chat bots, bill-pay on your online bank account, smartphone apps that summon taxis, jet engines that continuously communicate their status – you can hardly name any innovation today that isn’t driven primarily by the urge to solve a problem or meet a need in real time.

But what’s truly innovative – and what will soon become even more valuable than real time – is “soon time.” Amazon is a pioneer of soon time, with services designed not to satisfy your need in real time, but to satisfy your next need, before you may even be aware that you have it. So you never run out of paper towels, or peanut butter, and you don’t even have to figure out what book or movie you’d most like to consume next.

“Soon time” is the time zone for innovations that anticipate your needs.

And within a decade or two, you can expect that machine learning and artificial intelligence, when combined with virtual personal assistants and the Internet of Things, will transform much of your world from real time to soon time.