What time is it?

It’s such a basic question and provokes me to take a look at time in the context of both humans and artificial intelligence. Simply put, AI operates inside the now, the perpetual present. Yet humans construct meaning across time. This “temporal divide” creates a key distinction, if not a conflict, that’s worthy of a deeper look. Start the clock.

Typically, we evaluate artificial intelligence by capability, which includes things like speed, accuracy, fluency, and even scale. But my take is that this perspective misses something that is both critical and deeply human. Human cognition is fundamentally temporal. We build meaning through continuity, and this includes memory, revision, anticipation, and the lived accumulation of experience. AI does not. It generates coherence entirely inside the present moment.

For us, meaning is shaped across duration, not inside a single instant. We don’t form identity or understanding from isolated frames. We form it from sequence. We don’t just learn from a single moment that is compelling or resonant. We learn from many moments that inform and reshape each other. The reliability of our beliefs depends on that slow (emphasis on slow) integration. It’s how understanding matures into something stable, or perhaps better said, human.

The Eternal Present of AI

AI collapses time into immediacy. Each output stands alone without intrinsic reference to what came before and without responsibility toward what may follow. And this fluency is statistical, not developmental. It doesn’t need to maintain continuity because it does not possess a self that persists across time. This is why AI can be so persuasive, as it produces coherence without the weight of history behind it.

A recent study that examined LSAT-style reasoning tasks illustrates this temporal distortion rather clearly. AI assistance led participants to perform slightly better, but to feel dramatically more improved than they actually were. This illusion emerges because instant coherence (tech) feels like internal mastery (human). Anyone who has used AI to summarize a concept has felt this. It happens when you read a smooth, confident explanation and suddenly believe you now “understand” it without any of the internal struggle that produces true understanding. The mind confuses the appearance of cognition with the acquisition of cognition. And the key distinction is that AI shortens the distance between exposure and confidence, not between exposure and wisdom.

The Human Mind Is Built on Continuity

Interestingly, there’s also a philosophical twist here. Spiritual traditions have long idealized the present moment as a higher cognitive state. It provides the freedom from attachment to the past and the future. Ironically, AI lives in that state by default—it’s not transcending narrative. It never had a narrative to begin with. It’s not collapsing time, because it simply never contained time at all.

I think this matters because humans may begin adapting to the temporal logic of machines. If present-tense coherence becomes more rewarding than the slower accumulation of meaning, we could begin to trade our temporal cognition for the immediacy AI offers. The risk is not replacement, but more of a dissociation from the very structure of meaning-making that defines the human mind.

Trading Time for Fluency

Human cognition matters because it survives across time. We revise beliefs through error. We internalize consequences. We carry continuity. And when an idea remains standing after years of contact with reality, it becomes more than a pattern; it becomes knowledge.

Without a doubt, AI will eventually have engineered continuity layers and simulated autobiographical state. But synthetic continuity is not lived continuity. AI builds coherence from the outside, leveraging pattern matching at tremendous scale. Humans build coherence from the inside, and this is our experience that’s integrated into identity.

The real question, as I have relentlessly asked, is not whether AI will think like we do. The question is whether we will continue to think like ourselves. To defend the narrative arc is far from a poetic gesture. It’s an essential cognitive practice. For me, It means tolerating slower understanding when speed is seductive. It means returning to the longer thread of experience when instant fluency tempts us. It means remembering that wisdom requires the friction of time. And that’s something we all should consider.

Artificial Intelligence Essential Reads

Meaning is temporal. Story is temporal. Identity is temporal.

AI does not live there. We do.