AI and Time

#ai #agi #time #intelligence #consciousness

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As humans, not only we quantify (e.g. 1 hour) and label time (e.g. 17th February 2026, 2:26 AM), we perceive them 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 forget events or confuse them regularly. 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 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.

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.

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

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

Maybe, solving the problem about time is another step forward to build a better AI.