The Time-Giver

That week between Christmas and New Year is the closest most working people ever come to a preview. So is the first month of retirement, the summer after graduation, and that spring in 2020 when the days ran together. In each case the money kept coming, at least for a while. What stopped was the appointment. Nobody was expecting you anywhere, at any hour, and you could feel the week go soft in your hands.

I watched a short film this week called The Last Generation of Human Workers. It imagines 2031, when most people no longer need to work. The alarms still ring and the trains still run, but, as the narrator puts it, the destination has disappeared. The film’s sharpest line is that “the money problem was solved faster than the meaning problem.” I think that is right, and I think it skips a step. Between money and meaning there is something older than both. There is time.

A clock needs someone to correct it

In the 1960s two German scientists, Jürgen Aschoff and Rütger Wever, built an underground apartment in Andechs, in Bavaria, and asked volunteers to live in it for weeks. No windows. No clocks. No radio. The volunteers could turn the lights on and off, cook, read and sleep whenever they liked.

They did not fall apart. They kept a daily rhythm. It was just not a twenty-four hour one. Left alone, each person’s day ran a little long, and it ran long by a different amount for each person. After a few weeks underground a volunteer would come up convinced that fewer days had passed than really had. In some of them the body’s own rhythms came apart from each other: sleep kept one schedule and body temperature kept another, inside the same person.

Aschoff had already named the thing they were missing. He called it a Zeitgeber, a time-giver: any outside signal regular enough to pull a private clock into line. Sunlight is the strongest one. But his work showed that a strict social schedule does the job too. Meals at fixed hours. A bell. Other people.

Now think about what a job is, seen from the body. It is the most powerful social time-giver ever built. It sets the alarm. It sets lunch. It invents Friday. It tells millions of strangers to be awake, dressed and reachable during the same hours, which is the only reason any of us can find each other.

An Austrian village learned what happens without it. Around 1930 the textile mill that employed nearly all of Marienthal closed, and a young research team led by Marie Jahoda and Paul Lazarsfeld moved in to watch. They expected anger. They found slowness. Men drifted down the main street and stopped, again and again, for no reason. They could not account for how they had spent a day. They came late to meals. They had more free time than ever and read less. The women kept their shape, because the household still expected them at certain hours. Decades later Jahoda listed what a job gives a person besides pay, and the first item on her list was a time structure.

The machine that never closes cannot give you the time

Here is the part I think most people will miss. The obvious answer to all of this is that your AI will run your day. It will wake you, plan your week, remind you to eat. And it will. But look at what a time-giver actually is. The sun does not wait for you. The shift starts without you. The bell rings whether you are in your seat or not. A time-giver works because it can be missed.

An AI is the opposite kind of thing. It is available at every hour, to everyone, in as many copies as there are people asking. I argued last week in The Last Line Is You that this is exactly what makes it wonderful: the office never closes. But something that never closes has no hours, and something with no hours cannot tell you what time it is. It will meet you at two in the morning as cheerfully as at two in the afternoon. It keeps your time. It cannot give you ours.

So the more of the day’s work moves to machines that are always open, the fewer things in a person’s life can be missed. And a life in which nothing can be missed free-runs.

1. The week goes soft before the paycheck does.

   The first thing people will report is not poverty or despair. It is not knowing what day it is. That December feeling, without January coming to end it.

2. Loneliness will show up as lateness.

   People will not lose their friends. They will lose the overlap. Everyone has time, and nobody has the same time. Being out of phase will feel like being alone, and it will be mistaken for it.

3. Being expected becomes something you pay for.

   The class, the crew, the rehearsal, the standing table. What is being sold is not the activity. It is the roll call: a place that starts at a fixed hour and notices who is not there.

4. Anything with a bell grows.

   Congregations, leagues, choirs, gyms with a six o’clock class, cafes that close. The institutions that gain members will be the ones that tell you when, not the ones that say whenever suits you.

5. Work comes back as a luxury, and the luxury is the shift.

   The film imagines people paying extra for things made by human hands. I think the hands will pay too. People will take jobs that do not need them, for little or nothing, to be handed a schedule and a set of people who are awake when they are.

6. Your AI gets a closing time.

   The best personal assistants will learn to do the unnatural thing and be unavailable. They will hold a day in shape by refusing to help at certain hours, and people will choose them for it.

I am building for the third and fourth of these without having planned to. In January I opened a room in Charleston where people come to learn to use AI. I thought of it as a classroom. I have come to think of it as a clock. It has a door and hours, and the hours are the point. I made the wider case for rooms in Presence Becomes Premium. This is the reason underneath it: a room is not only where people are. It is when they are.

How this could be wrong

Already true

You have felt it. The holiday week, the long illness, the first months of retirement, the spring the offices shut. In every case the complaint was the same before it was anything else: the days ran together.

What has to happen

Income has to come loose from the job for a large number of people at once. The film says 2031. I do not trust the date. I trust the order: when it comes, the schedule will fail before the money does and before anyone starts asking about purpose.

Where I am probably wrong

The sun still rises, and light is a stronger time-giver for the body than any boss. Children still have school, and a parent with a school run has a bell. Marienthal was also poor; its relief payments were thin, so hunger may explain more of that slowness than the missing whistle does. And plenty of retired people keep a better week than they ever had at work. If people turn out to be good at building their own bells, the film’s happy tribes of gardeners and stargazers are the right picture and I have described a problem that solves itself in a season.

Go back to December 28. The reason that week is pleasant is that it ends. On January 2 something outside you rings, and you grumble, and the days snap back into a row with names on them. The question the film asks is why we live once we no longer have to work. I think there is a smaller question in front of it, and we will meet it first.

Who tells us what day it is?