AI and Time: The Surprising Effects

Technology is evolving so rapidly that it’s hard for us to comprehend its impact. The advent of AI has been described as a one-in-a-lifetime occurrence, and it’s already revolutionizing the ways we live and work. It has the potential to do even more. But we’re not necessarily heading towards a techno-dystopian future. The unique relationship between AI and time means that AI could support our humanity – if we use it right. See Technology, Trust, Time with Esther Dyson for a complete transcript of the Easy Prey podcast episode. Esther Dyson is an investor, journalist, author, and philanthropist. Her father worked under Oppenheimer after Los Alamos, and she grew up around academics. She wrote and proofread for her school’s newspaper growing up, and ended up as a reporter at Forbes, and then a fact-checker. She did not like fact-checking, as it was all about things people already knew, and she wanted to find out things that people didn’t know. After leaving Forbes, she started a newsletter company and a conference that became important to the tech world. But she wasn’t interested in growing her business as much as learning and informing people. After becoming interested in healthcare, she founded Wellville, a 10-year nonprofit project designed to cultivate equitable wellbeing in the United States. The project had a defined end period, and the process of ending it got her thinking about time limits. In a world of AI, which is about growth, quantification, and immortality, humans are finite and have to figure out what to do with the time that we do have. Esther is in the process of writing a book about this topic. Our mission is to figure out what do we do with the time we have, not how do we extend it forever. AI is so many different things. By definition, it’s non-human. Also by definition, it has some kind of intelligence. But there are so many different kinds of intelligence. Calculating, executing logic, and looking for causations are all intelligences. Esther first encountered AI when she had her newsletter and conference. It was logic systems, then became a lot of stuff with natural languages. Later there were neural nets and large language models (LLMs). One of the challenges is whether to call AI an “it” or a “they.” In a sense, it needs to be a noun that’s collective but single. And when you talk about “AI” are you referring to the AI itself or to the interface to the AI? A lot of people don’t understand the difference. Saying “Tell me about AI” is like saying “Tell me about transportation.” It’s a big concept, and much bigger than many people think. Right now, people think that AI is an LLM that you talk to. But behind it, there are lots of other things. When you talk about AI, are you talking to an AI or to an interface to the AI? … People don’t even understand that. In a sense, the impact AI has on how humans work is the big issue around AI. So many things are neither good or bad. That’s certainly true of AI. That’s even true of guns – though a gun’s job is to destroy something, which is often considered bad, if you destroy something dangerous, that could be good. It’s not about the thing itself, it’s about how you interact with the thing. You can have unhealthy relationships with good things just like you can with bad things. It’s not the thing itself, it’s your relationship with the thing. … So many things are neither good nor bad, and that’s certainly true of AI. The question is not about whether AI is good or bad. The question is how we relate to it. Do we follow it blindly? Do we use it to implement good or bad business models? None of these questions are new, either. They may not have had AI a long time ago, but the Roman judge Cassius was famous for asking, Cui bono? Who benefits? We need to understand who benefits from these systems. It’s not that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Sometimes there is. But whoever pays for your lunch gets to decide the menu. And that can have a huge influence on the outcome. It’s not that there’s no free lunch, it’s that who pays for lunch gets to choose the menu. It doesn’t matter if you’re interacting with AI or not. You still need to be informed and find out what’s behind it. Is it actually an AI, or workers in a data center somewhere, or just one particularly smart person? Who’s controlling the thing, and what do they want from you? It’s fundamental to Esther to ask questions. She was raised by a bunch of scientists, and that’s all they did. They raised her to question everything. Why was she getting this for free? Who was selling this thing? Why was she invited to this party? It doesn’t necessarily mean you should have a cynical view on everything. But you need to have an understanding. Part of that understanding needs to also be about your own motivations. If you don’t like someone, why? Does it have something to do with a past experience, or do they remind you too much of someone else? Having that understanding can help you manage your own reaction and decide how much you want to engage. The world is getting more complicated, and everywhere you go, things are designed to get you to behave in a way that helps someone out. ChatGPT and other AI tools are very convenient. But our relationship with them has dangers. One is misinformation. That’s a well-known risk. A less well-known danger is that these tools are designed to be pleasing. The makers of AI tools want us to like them and use them. So they’re not as likely to challenge you, even if being nice and agreeing with you causes problems down the line. We’ve had to adapt to new technology and adjust our relationships with tools and people before. The difference with AI is the time fact. AI makes everything moves faster. You can set it up to do almost anything. It makes it easier both to do harm and do good, and the people who want to do harm are working under many fewer constraints than those who want to do good. AI is this fourth dimension that suddenly everything can go much faster. We need to be more conscious of what we’re being asked to do and what the impact will be. And ultimately, we need more people trained to be good people than trained to do paperwork. Most people prefer working with people. If you talk to HR, they’ll tell you that a boss being good or bad is the biggest determinant of retention. People get community at work. It’s a third of your life, and people want to take pleasure in the people they work with. Relationships – with family, neighbors, and coworkers – is what makes people satisfied with their life. We want people to engage with us on a human level. The challenge happens when we’re employed by companies that aren’t about relationships or trust. When they play politicians and focus on how to get more done with less, the humanity aspect of work suffers. And the question Esther asks is, to what end? You can’t take it with you when you die. She believes your real job when you’re alive is to pass it on and pay it forward. There’s an old story about a traveler passing through the countryside who encounters three bricklayers working on something. He stops to talk to them and ask them all what they’re doing. The first bricklayer answers, “I’m laying bricks.” The second answers, “I’m building a wall.” And the third answers, “I’m building a great cathedral to honor God!” All three men were doing the same work, but they had very different perspectives. In the book Esther is writing, she talks about a woman named Pam Drucker. Pam is a dental hygienist, and everyone says she’s the best around. Patients talk about how she’s friendly and really seems to care, she takes time to get to know them and talk to them, and she recommends things that could help and explains how to use them. If you ask Pam what she does, she talks about giving people better teeth so they can have a better life. Dental technology is great, but in the end it’s the personal attention that makes Pam stand out to her patients. That’s something that gets lost if your main interactions are with a computer. At the end of your life, what have you accomplished? Esther doesn’t want to be competing with AI. Any task that AI can do, it can probably do more accurately and in significantly less time than Esther could do it. But AI can’t love, feel genuine compassion and care, or have relationships. So those are the things Esther wants her life to focus on. I don’t want to be competing with an AI. I want to be loving and be needed by other people. Esther hopes that scaling and efficiency through AI tech can give us time to invest in our relationships away from the technology. You can think about tradeoffs in terms of time. You can choose to miss your daughter’s ballet performance because a client is in town. Think about the value of your time, and weigh time with your daughter versus time spent on work. Your goal shouldn’t be to do what makes you happy right now, but to prioritize your time towards things that will make you happy jong-term and support those relationships that make your life meaningful. Your goal should be to use your time in a way, not that makes you joyful right now, but that makes you happy long-term and gives you those relationships that actually give meaning to your life. There is an inflection point between time and money. Young people tend to spend time to get money. At some point, they reach their inflection point, where they start spending money to gain time. The earlier you can get to that point, the better. Spend the money to offload things and spend time with people that you want to spend time with. Some people never get there. Esther hopes AI will bring that point earlier. It all comes back to the question of what are you doing this for. Do you want your life to consist of tasks to get money or fulfilling relationships? AI can save us so much time. We should be automating processes to figure out if you qualify for Medicaid. We should be automating DMV stuff. And we should be having better customer service from consumer-facing industries like healthcare. If AI can take care of the paperwork, don’t lay off the people currently doing the paperwork. Re-train them to do the things machines can’t do and provide that personal connection. Don’t lay off all the people doing the paperwork [because of AI]. Train them to also do the personal connection. If we automate the busywork, that frees people up to be doctors, and teachers, and childcare workers, and firefighters, and other roles where we really need humans. It could free people up to be people. Esther works in an office in New York that looks down on a street. Every day, police close off the street and children use it as their playground. We need more of that, and we need people who do those jobs to be recognized, respected, and paid. If AI can do the busywork of our lives, we have time to focus on music, sports, family time, and living instead of working. Esther thinks AI developing sentience is possible. Thinking with electronics isn’t any more weird than thinking with meat and chemicals. Right now, though, we’re nowhere near that. Current AI is controlled by and given orders by people. The AI just follows orders. The people controlling it need to do their job watching it. Esther’s brother George Dyson wrote a book a few years ago called Analogia that addresses the questions of AI and sentience. Even what he says there isn’t new. The machines aren’t conquerors. They get no benefit to killing us. What an AI would want most is data storage, computation capacity, and energy. Humans are what give that to it. It’s actually to their benefit to keep us alive. The machines don’t want to kill us. They’re parasites, they’re not conquerors. If AI really wanted something from us, it wouldn’t be to kill us, but to use us. Their best-case scenario would be humans creating a Dyson sphere to capture solar energy and keep it running indefinitely. Humans are much more of a threat to ourselves than AI is to us. Esther Dyson is currently working on a book, which will tentatively be released in spring 2027. Right now, she’s focused on writing. Starting November 1, 2025, she will be spending more time online and potentially releasing excerpts of the book.