Time Is Changing

“Time is money.” We’ve all heard it, and at first glance, it makes sense in a hectic world that measures everything in transactions. But the idea also flattens one of our most profound experiences—time itself—into a mere commodity, a line on the balance sheet. We save it, waste it, invest it, sell it. We talk about time the way we talk about dollars or data. No wonder we can’t shake the sense that we’re always running out.

If you’ve spent even half an hour online, you’ve felt it: the internet dissolves our usual sense of “before and after.” A tweet from 2012 stands next to breaking news from this morning, which coexists with a meme posted three seconds ago. Chronology collapses into one swirling now.

Scroll far enough, and hours vanish. It’s suddenly three in the morning, but it feels like you’ve been suspended in a timeless loop. Perhaps that’s part of why some of us fantasize about living forever—hoping to reclaim all those lost hours. Outside our screens, mortality hits us like a ticking clock; inside, it’s an endless feed.

Enter Artificial Intelligence. AI treats all data—new or old—as equally valid, sifting through vast archives in microseconds. If we ever reach AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), it might juggle endless what-if scenarios before deciding which path to take. We’re stuck in one timeline, but AI can roam across many.

Because AI doesn’t care about temporal boundaries, it highlights an even stranger truth about the internet: it’s a realm unmoored from ordinary physics. Much like quantum states that can occupy multiple possibilities at once, the internet houses past, present, and future side by side, awaiting our clicks. And if code can replicate infinitely, then scarcity—so central to our real-world thinking—doesn’t map easily onto digital space.

If AI captures the infinite, blockchains impose the sequence. Every new block is a timestamp: this happened, then that. It’s our attempt to anchor the digital realm in a predictable timeline, the way we once tamed wild rivers by building dams and channels. Immutable ledgers bring a kind of industrial order to a place that otherwise floats outside linear time.

But are we really taming anything? It may be more accurate to say we’re stitching our human need for order onto a domain that obeys different laws. The internet might not be “lawless” at all—just governed by rules we haven’t fully grasped. Still, blockchains give us a foothold, a place to stand where we can say, “This block came first, so it’s settled.”

All of which raises a bigger point: the internet might as well be alien nature. It feels limitless, teeming with possibilities, and indifferent to our usual notions of scarcity or hierarchy. Yet we keep marching in with our old economic models, built for an earthbound world of finite resources—gold, land, steel. Online, especially as AI scales, these limits become negotiable or irrelevant.

So what happens if demand and supply both become effectively infinite? We’ve never truly lived in a situation like that. The result is a weird swirl of memes, tokenized assets, paywalls, and artificially constrained digital goods. We impose scarcity because we’re used to it, not necessarily because the internet demands it.

Imagine building a log cabin on a new planet: we bring hammers and nails, but the environment has its own gravity and atmosphere. That might be what we’re doing with our markets: slapping them onto an alien landscape that obeys laws we’ve only begun to glimpse.

It doesn’t stop at economics. In everyday life, we like binary logic: right or wrong, true or false, success or failure. Online, those distinctions blur. One timeline is championing a news story as fact; another calls it a hoax, and both exist in the same feed. It’s reminiscent of quantum superpositions, where a particle can be in multiple states until observed.

It’s unsettling. Our usual frameworks rely on consistency and a single objective reality, but the digital realm shrugs at that. Contradictory ideas thrive side by side, fueling culture wars, conspiracy theories, and endless debates. We’re seeing firsthand how a non-linear, multi-truth environment upends every neat category we once trusted.

Amid all this fluidity, one thing remains indisputably scarce: attention. You can’t store it; you can’t create more of it. Once a minute of your focus is gone, it’s gone. Platforms, advertisers, and content creators scramble to capture it because they know it’s the one asset that can’t be duplicated.

If everything else online can be duplicated or mass-produced, attention becomes the only real currency. That’s why countless business models revolve around hooking you. The more time you give, the more profit they reap. Yet it also opens doors to new forms of exchange, where what we spend might not be dollars but the capacity to direct our focus—or even direct machine intelligence.

But human attention isn’t the only moment-bound resource. Consider compute power. Every second your processor or GPU isn’t doing anything, that potential is lost forever—unlike data or code, which you can copy endlessly. Projects like Folding@home illustrated this concept: leave your device running to help with protein research, and your otherwise wasted compute cycles become valuable.

Suddenly, “spending time” can also mean directing machine cycles in real time. If our personal AI assistant isn’t busy, or our server racks are idle at night, that’s a missed opportunity—time we could have contributed to breakthroughs or sold to someone else. In a future brimming with AI tools, controlling where and when compute happens may be as influential as money in the bank.

If every waking minute—and every idle computing cycle—counts as an asset that expires if unused, how do we choose where to direct it? Picture a small-town entrepreneur who has leftover GPU capacity overnight. She could lend it to a medical research program or a local climate modeling project. Or maybe she allocates it to a friend’s startup that needs extra computing muscle.

Similarly, each of us decides every morning: Do I devote precious focus to social media drama, or do I invest it in learning, creation, or deeper connection? The concept of time-capital isn’t just about personal productivity; it reorients our values. Profit might remain important, but when time truly becomes the scarcest of all resources, the question shifts to: “What’s worth these minutes I can never get back?”

Altogether, this suggests we’re inching toward a world where time spent, by humans and machines, is the only resource we can’t replicate. That doesn’t mean we discard markets or currency overnight. But our entire economic and social fabric might need rewriting if the core bottleneck is time rather than materials.

Think of a bustling coworking space in 2040. People trade not just money, but available AI cycles. One person’s specialized machine-learning rig is idle for two hours—someone else picks it up to run advanced simulations. Meanwhile, the global conversation moves on from “who owns what” to “who directed their ephemeral minutes and compute toward the most meaningful outcomes?”

So we stand on the brink of a new landscape—one where AI spawns infinite possibilities, blockchains enforce an almost mechanical sense of order, and human or machine time emerges as the ultimate capital. Our old definitions of wealth, grounded in scarcity of goods and labor, are shaken when faced with a medium that can spawn copies without limit but still runs out of time.

It’s unsettling, like quantum physics was to the early 20th century, exposing contradictions and complexities we struggle to interpret. But it also cracks open possibilities we’ve barely imagined—ways to create value that aren’t tethered to hoarding resources or chasing illusions of perpetual growth.

If time—both human attention and machine compute—really is our final frontier of scarcity, then every choice about how to spend it becomes a statement of what we value most. And in a world so often shaped by external pressures and infinite feeds, it may be the closest we come to real agency.

Perhaps that’s the greatest takeaway from this strange digital era. Our days might feel fragmented, our sense of time warped, and our feeds overflowing with contradictions—but the minutes still belong to us, one by one.

Just remember: once they’re gone, there’s no getting them back.

cowritten with ChatGPT-o1