AI Perception of Time Goes Beyond Human Limits

An understanding of the passage of time is fundamental to human consciousness. While we continue to debate if artificial intelligence (AI) can have consciousness, one thing is certain: AI will experience time differently. His sense of time will be dictated not by biology, but by its calculation, sensory and communication processes. How are we going to coexist with an extraterrestrial intelligence that perceives and acts in a very different time world?

What simultaneity means for a human

Clap your hands while looking at them. You see, hear and feel the CLAP as a single multimodal event – the visual, audio and tactile senses appear simultaneous and define the “now”. Our consciousness plays these sensory assets as simultaneous, although they arrive at different moments: the light reaches our eyes faster than the sound reaches our ears, while our brain treats audio faster than it does complex visual information. However, it all looks like a moment.

This illusion comes from an integrated brain mechanism. The brain defines “now” through a brief window of time during which several sensory perceptions are collected and integrated. This period of time, generally up to a few hundred milliseconds, is called the temporal integration window (TWI). As a proxy for this temporal grid, the films with 24 images per second create an illusion of continuous movement.

But human Twi has its limits. See a distant flash and you will hear Thunder’s rumble a few seconds later. Human Twi has evolved to assemble sensory information only for events at around 10 to 15 meters. This is our horizon of simultaneity.

Extraterrestrial intelligence in the physical world

AI is about to become a standard part of robots and other machines that perceive and interact with the physical world. These machines will use the wired sensors in their bodies, but also remote sensors that send digital data from afar. A robot can receive data from an orbit satellite around 600 km above the earth and process the data as in real time, because the transmission takes only 2 ms – faster than the human Twi.

The sensors of a human are “wired” for the body, which establishes two premises on how the brain interacts with the physical world. First, the propagation delay of each brain sensor is predictable. When a sound occurs in the environment, the unpredictable factor is the distance between the sound source and our ears; The ears delay in the brain is fixed. Second, each sensor is used by a single human brain. The human horizon of simultaneity has evolved through millions of years in these premises, optimized to help us assess opportunities and threats. A lion 15 meters was worth worrying, but thunder at 3 kilometers was probably not.

These two premises will not always be valid for smart machines with a multimodal perception. An AI system can receive data from a remote sensor with unpredictable bond delays. And a single sensor can provide data to many different AI modules in real time, such as a eye shared by several brains. Consequently, the AI systems will evolve their own perception of space and time and their own horizon of simultaneity, and they will change much more quickly than the glacial rhythm of human evolution. We will soon coexist with an extraterrestrial intelligence which has a different perception of time and space.

The temporal advantage of the AI

Here is where things become strange. AI systems are not limited by biological treatment speeds and can perceive time with unprecedented precision, discovering cause and effect relationships that occur too quickly for human perception.

In our hyperconnected world, this could lead to Rashomon effects on a large scale, where several observers give contradictory perspectives on events. (The term comes from a classic Japanese film in which several characters describe the same incident in a dramatically different way, each shaped by their own point of view.)

Imagine a traffic accident in the year 2045 in an intersection of the lively city, observed by three observers: a human pedestrian, a system of AI directly connected to street sensors and a distant AI system receiving the same sensory data on a digital link. Human simply perceives a robot entering the road just before a car crushed there. The local AI, with immediate access to the sensor, records the precise order: the robot moving first, then the braking of the car, then the collision. Meanwhile, the perception of distant AI is biased by communication delays, perhaps recording braking before perceiving the robot entering the road. Each perspective offers a different effect sequence. Which witness will be considered credible, a human or a machine? And what machine?

People with malicious intention could even use high -power AI systems to make “events” using a generative AI and insert them into the overall flow of events perceived by less capable machines. Humans equipped with prolonged reality interfaces could be particularly vulnerable to such manipulations, as they would continually take digital sensory data.

If the sequence of events is distorted, it can disturb our feeling of causality, potentially disturbing critical systems such as emergency response, financial trade or autonomous driving. People could even use AI systems capable of predicting milliseconds before being confused and messed up. If an AI system has predicted an event and transmitted to false data at a specific time, it could create a false appearance of causal. For example, an AI that could predict the stock market movements could publish a news alert manufactured just before a planned sale.

Computers put horodatages, nature does not

The engineer’s instinct could be to solve the problem of digital horodatage on sensory data. However, horodatages require precise clock synchronization, which requires more power than many small devices cannot manage.

And even if the sensory data is horodifying, communication or processing delays can make it arrive too late for a smart machine to act on real -time data. Imagine an industrial robot in a factory responsible for stopping a machine if a worker gets too closer. The sensors detect the movement of a worker and a warning signal – including a time time for the network. But there is an unexpected network hiccups and the signal arrives after 200 milliseconds, so the robot acts too late to prevent an accident. Horodatages do not make predictable communication delays, but they can help rebuild what has gone wrong after the fact.

Nature, of course, does not put horodatages on events. We deduce time flow and causality by comparing the arrival hours of event data and integrating it into the model of the world of the brain.

Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity noted that simultaneity depends on the frame of the observer and can vary with movement. However, this has also shown that the causal order of events, the sequence in which effects causes, remains coherent for all observers. This is not the case for smart machines. Due to unpredictable communication delays and variable processing times, smart machines can perceive events in a different causal order.

In 1978, Leslie Lamport addressed this problem for distributed computers, introducing logical clocks to determine the relationship “Arrival before” between digital events. To adapt this approach to the intersection of physical and digital worlds, we must fight against unpredictable delays between a real event and its digital horoding.

This crucial physical world tunneling in the digital world occurs at specific access points: a digital device or a sensor, wifi routers, satellites and basic stations. Since individual devices or sensors can be hacked quite easily, the responsibility of maintaining precise and trustworthy information on time and causal order will be more and more on digital infrastructure nodes.

This vision is aligned with developments in 6G, the next wireless standard. In 6G, basic stations will not only relay information, but they will also feel their environment. These future basic stations must become trustworthy bridges between the physical and digital worlds. The development of these technologies could be essential while we are entering an unpredictable future shaped by rapidly evolving extraterrestrial intelligences.