How AI’s Sense of Time Will Differ From Ours
IEEE Spectrum - AI
Aug 13, 2025 14:00
Petar Popovski
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Summary
The article explains that AI will experience time fundamentally differently from humans, as its sense of “now” is shaped by computational and sensory processes rather than biology. Unlike humans, who perceive simultaneous events through integrated sensory inputs and brain mechanisms, AI’s perception of time will be defined by its hardware and algorithms. This difference raises important questions about how humans and AI will coexist and interact, given their distinct temporal experiences.
An understanding of the passage of time is fundamental to human consciousness. While we continue to debate whether artificial intelligence (AI) can possess consciousness, one thing is certain: AI will experience time differently. Its sense of time will be dictated not by biology, but by its computational, sensory, and communication processes. How will we coexist with an alien intelligence that perceives and acts in a very different temporal world? What Simultaneity Means to 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 out these sensory inputs as simultaneous, although they arrive at different times: Light reaches our eyes faster than sound reaches our ears, while our brain processes audio faster than it does complex visual information. Still, it all feels like one moment. That illusion stems from a built-in brain mechani