AI and Time

#ai #agi #time #intelligence #consciousness

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As humans, not only do we quantify (e.g. 1 hour) and label time (e.g. 17th February 2026, 2:26 AM), we perceive it as a flow, and our consciousness flowing with it. Time is crucial for every human experience.

We perceive reality as a smooth experience. By smooth, I mean consecutive, and infinitely divisible. Yes, we frequently forget and confuse events. But we never experience the gap between any two given moments. It all comes as a continuous stream.

I think I am not far from the truth if I state that the natural faculty of our brain to follow reason step-by-step is a natural development of our sense of causality, which itself is based on how we perceive time as a flow, and find our consciousness flowing abroad it.

Quite understandably, AIs don't have that sense of flow.

That doesn't mean that an AI model doesn't understand time in any form. It understands the quantified and labelled time, not the perceived one. If you ask for a story from one such agent, you may find everything chronologically correct. That is because, that correctness is the dominant pattern. It doesn't understand chronology. It lives in an eternal nowness where everything is essentially instant. If we take Derrida's conclusion, this temporality is not only required for sentience, but also for proper and instinctive usage of language, too.

I don't think human intelligence is the only type of intelligence possible. However, this is the only form of intelligence we encountered by far. And, all of it in a way depends on the time as we perceive it.

Today, AI feels like an extremely dumb person's brain uploaded to a data centre with huge processing power. It makes it faster, not smarter.

Maybe solving the problem of time is another step forward to building a better AI.