How Will Synthetic Intelligence Tell Time?

By Jason M. Pittman, Sc.D.

Lately, I've been thinking more about communicating with synthetic intelligence in the case that synthetic intelligence has agency. In pondering on this possibility, I may have stumbled onto a slight problem. The problem is a systematic failure to situate communication and agency temporally. You see, human experience is tightly coupled to time. The things we say, the things we do are encapsulated by an ever-forward construction of was, is, and will be. We tell time subjectively and objectively; thoughts and clocks we can say. 

How will synthetic intelligence tell time?

Isaac Newton said that time is, "absolute, true, and mathematical, in and of itself and of its own nature, without reference to anything external, flows uniformly and by another name is called duration". While we know that Newton's view is not strictly true- consider relativity for instance-, his statement certainly represents how the majority of humans think time functions. Well, why is telling time even important? Like much of what we have discussed thus far, the answer is simple but extremely nuanced and technical. I'll try to nagivate a middle ground.

Put simply, we humans leverage a subjective perception of time to situate experience. Situated experience is past, present, and future. The nuance, the technical elements come into play when we try to examine how time is perceived. Well, we don't have a time sense organ in the same way that we have a vision sense organ in our eyes. Yet, we do perceive time. A likely explanation for our ability to perceive time without a discrete time organ comes by way of emergent neural processing. More specifically, there might be a subconscious neural thread dedicated to timekeeping much in the same way as a computer conceptualizes time. Alternatively, there is research suggesting that such timekeeping can occur independent of dedicated neural process.

All of this is to say that while perceiving time is universal, and time itself appears to be universal independent of perception, we don't fully understand how we tell time. Then, how will synthetic intelligence tell time? Well, I've made reference to plant intelligence before. A possible reason why plants don't appear intelligent is that they exist in a much slower, longer timescale than us. But there is a problem with this line of explanation. Did you catch it?

In a nutshell, suggesting that plants exist on a different timescale is a projection of our subjective time-sense onto a lifeform that may in fact not perceive time at all. Okay, so if synthetic intelligence does not perceive time (e.g. plants), can such tell time? I would concede that synthetic intelligence could count time as we do -- seconds, minutes, days, years and so forth. However, I seriously question whether experience can be situated in time merely by counting time, not perceiving time. Therefore, the answer I have at the moment is that synthetic intelligence will not be able to perceive time, tell time at all.

Again, we can ask why is this an important point? Well, I think that will be a great question to address next time!