Jheri sent a note complaining about being jet-lagged after a flight from Nanjing to Copenhagen - six hours difference. It should have been more, but China ticks to UTC+06:00.
Someone asked me to think about major changes that I thought technology might inspire. Things that may even be quietly taking place now, but will grow and make themselves known a few decades from now. Like speculating about what would really impress someone from 125 years ago (it probably isn't the Internet or television), these are interesting exercises that hopefully give a bit of insight into the interaction between society and technology.
I've thought about this before but wouldn't claim great insight. I do find myself with the same candidate every time I think about this namely our relationship with time. Specifically cutting the tight bindings we have with synchronized time.
It is interesting to think about when the concept of modern time began to take hold. Once we responded to natural rhythms - sunrise, sunset, the seasons and so on .. but a mechanical means of dividing days up didn’t become very practical until about the 14th century and then only as expensive devices that showed hours. It took another four centuries or so for hands to appear.
Local solar time was still widely used in much of the 19th century - the concept of “high noon” ruled, but the advent of the telegraph and railroads required a synchronization of time. In the US there was railroad standard time with each railroad with its own flavor. Large stations had multiple clocks each showing different times. The concept of a timezone was invented and finally implemented in 1883 on the day of two noons.
The concept of modern time - 2:38:17 pm EDT eastern time being a meaningful point - dovetailed nicely with the needs of the industrial revolution and tied us to schedules driven by clocks. Efficiency and the concept of “scientific management” was promoted by Taylor and others. Many people became widgets and most of us became obsessed with this synchronization of time.
Einstein found himself working in a patent office while he was working on his Ph.D. remotely using the mail system. His speciality was looking at patents of schemes to synchronize time - meshing rather nicely with the physics he was working on at the time. Very deep thinking about simultaneity led to special relativity in 1905.
Today most of us know where we are in time and space to a fair degree of accuracy due to the global positioning system our cellphones use.
Clearly useful, but is it on target? Are the lives we lead - private and work - really much better than the world where 2:38:17 pm EDT was a ludicrous concept and “between lunch and dinner” was accurate enough?
Early in my Bell Labs career I found myself in a laboratory where personal time for creativity was a valued concept. There were meetings during the day as well as scheduled talks. The lunchroom opened and closed at a fixed time and there was tea every day at 4 pm. But much of the day was more flexible. The lab director was a believer in the need for an uninterrupted stretch of time where you set the pace.
We all had individual offices with doors on them. For three hours a day - our choice of morning or afternoon - our phones would go dead and we had a flag outside our office door indicating if we were in “cave mode” or if it was ok to have visitors. Most people collaborated, but you could get three full hours in the event you had achieved a state of Csíkszentmihályian flow. Of course the brain handles a many tasks simultaneously, but I find my conscious mind, whatever that is, tends to task switch single processes rather than multitask and there is a serious overhead associated with saving and restoring state. We had control over interruption.
We were held accountable during our yearly merit reviews, but researchers in the lab were carefully vetted and trusted.
Our lab was extremely productive - I would even use the word creative.
Several years later I transferred to another lab that didn’t have this boundary and felt an enormous difference. Fortunately I was able to move to another area where people could pretty much establish their own workflow. It was a negotiation with collaborators, but we had a reputation for doing great work and being difficult to schedule.
When I began to consult I mentioned this to an extremely creative company I have ties with and, mirabile dictu, they were fascinated and experimentally adopted the three hour block. I’ve been told it is something of a secret weapon for them. It does require people to get used to a different way of working and thinking.
Yet most of us are micro scheduled and are forced to deal with a stream of interruptions that destroy any kind of deep thinking.
“Overnight” or at most two days is the period that some assemblage of atoms should require to be sent from any point on the planet to our desk. A flood of people travel to and from work mostly during the same hours artificially clogging the roads and making the commutes much worse than they might otherwise be. We schedule “quality time” with families and even schedule blocks of time for our kid’s activities.
Some of this is necessary and some of it is pushed more than it needs to be. Having the ability to communicate whenever we want and wherever we are is something that implies choice, but many of us become slaves to it.
I have a gut feeling that our mobile networks and a few other technologies have the ability to free us a bit. In the mid 90s I began to notice that young people with cellphones were discovering that synchronizing meetings could be fuzzy - that you could tell someone roughly when and where you might be able to meet with them and go into hover mode where you might be doing something interesting rather than waiting on a corner for 35 minutes wondering if their train was late. At AT&T Research we prototyped a conceptual system called air graffiti that put a few other twists on this fuzzier concept of spacetime and could even act as a catalyst for serendipity while supporting normal modes of tight synchronization.
We’re all different. Some of us might be really creative at 11 am and dead to the world at 3 pm. I think we have a chance of moving to a world where the Talorized concept of tightly synchronized activities will begin to fade.
Perhaps we can take advantage of the fact that time is indeed relative. We may be at the beginning of a radical rethinking of what time is and means to us - as radical as when we started treating the artificial concept of 2:38:17 as something rigid.
And Jheri? Although she is tightly bound to the clock now, her path may lead her to forestry research and she may even find long periods of time where she takes note of and uses sunrise, sunset and the seasons.
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