Your AI Doesn’t Live in Your Second

Humans may soon lose their monopoly on reality and time, because AI won’t just see the world differently, it will experience time itself in ways alien to us.

We humans inhabit a fragile illusion of simultaneity. When you clap your hands, you both hear and see the moment as one, even though light reaches you faster than sound. The brain smooths the differences, stitching a “now” out of mismatched inputs. That horizon of simultaneity evolved to serve our survival—lions at fifteen meters were dangerous; thunder miles away was not.

Popovski warns that artificial intelligence will not inherit this biological calibration. Instead, AI’s “now” is defined by circuits, networks, and latency. A robot may treat a satellite’s image as instantaneous, while another system lags behind, perceiving a different sequence of cause and effect. Unlike Einstein’s universe, where causality is inviolate, AI can perceive events in orders that diverge from ours—and from each other’s.

The implications are chilling. Imagine three witnesses to a crash: you, a local AI wired to sensors, and a remote AI linked over the cloud. Each reports a different order of events. Who will courts trust? Who will governments regulate against? Popovski calls this the Rashomon effect of machine time.

And the risks don’t end with confusion. Bad actors could exploit these cracks in perception—injecting fabricated signals at just the right millisecond to rewrite causality. Stock markets, emergency systems, even our own extended-reality interfaces could be manipulated in ways no human would notice until too late.

What unsettles me most is the moral dimension. Time is the bedrock of truth. If machines fracture it, we risk losing a shared reality. The technical fixes—synchronization, 6G base stations, logical clocks—will matter, but they are not enough. We must ask: what ethical guardrails will we demand before surrendering causality itself to alien intelligences?

Progress without principles is regression. Popovski has shown us the problem. The question now is ours: how will we draw the line between machine time and human truth?

Read the full article on IEEE Spectrum.

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💡 We're entering a world where intelligence is synthetic, reality is augmented, and the rules are being rewritten in front of our eyes.

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