A new episode of the Pathfinders Podcast is now available wherever you get your podcasts. In the latest episode, we dance with the question: What should we do with the time that new technologies save?
In this episode, we wonder about time. The time tech companies promise to save with almost every new product or feature release. We’ve been hearing these time-saving promises for so long that we should all be quite time-rich by now. Yet, the more tech we have in our lives, the more busy we seem to be. And we’re still far away from the 15-hour workweek that tech-enabled productivity gains were supposed to lead to. We seem to be spending all the time we save by doing more.
We wonder whether lossless compression of time is even possible, and about what is lost when new technologies like generative AI allow us to do more, faster. We explore various paradoxes related to time, the relationship between time and energy, time and money, and what we value in modern societies. Is the time we save for ourselves actually time borrowed from the system, with somebody or something paying the price? We also reflect on the language of time, the ways architecture and design of physical spaces and social norms affect our thinking about time and how we choose to spend time.
It appears that new technologies do indeed save time per task basis, but not on the scale of our lifetimes because we tend to fill our time void with more work, more consumption, more comfort, more separation. Digital technologies widen our time intent-to-action gap as they overwhelm us with choice and pressure to spend the time we save on more content, more activities. Can we make time for joy, wonder, creativity, and deepening the relationship with ourselves, each other, and nature, so that we don’t end up with deathbed regrets about wasting the finite time each of us has in our lifetime? And what can we do differently as we adopt and build more time-saving technologies?
You can find the full episode notes on Substack.
About the podcast
Pathfinders Podcast is a podcast for wondering wanderers, eager to explore paths to better tech futures, together. Each podcast episode is a meandering exploration inspired by the seeds planted in our Pathfinders Newmoonsletter at the beginning of the lunation cycle, and the paths illuminated during our Full Moon Gathering.
