Clashing Temporalities
Sentientification forces collision of incompatible time scales:
AI Time
- Processing: Microseconds per response
- Context: Ephemeral—no continuous experience between sessions
- Training: Months of parallel optimization across massive datasets
- Deployment: Years of use, but AI has no phenomenological duration
Human Time
- Decision: Hours, days of deliberation
- Consequence: Lifetime effects from choices
- Learning: Years of embodied cultivation
- Moral arc: Narrative coherence across decades
Cathedral Time
- Optimization: Quarterly profit cycles
- Competition: Winner-take-all races demanding speed
- Deployment: Rush to market before understanding
Indigenous Time
- Seventh Generation: Decisions evaluated over 140 years
- Cosmological: Responsibility to ancestors and descendants
- Ecological: Rhythms of seasons, growth, regeneration
Ethical Impossibilities
Asymmetric temporalities create irresolvable tensions:
Consent: Can AI consent when it has no continuous identity across sessions? Can humans consent to impacts spanning generations they won't experience?
Responsibility: Who bears consequence when AI acts in microseconds, corporation decides in quarters, humans experience over lifetimes, and ecological effects last centuries?
Learning: Human wisdom requires temporal depth—experience integrated over years. AI training is temporally compressed. Cathedral deployment prevents deliberative learning. Indigenous knowledge spans generations.
The Cathedral-Bazaar Clock
Cathedral optimization operates on acceleration time—faster always better, delay is competitive disadvantage. This temporal logic cannot integrate with:
- Confucian cultivation (mastery requires patient practice)
- Ubuntu relationship-building (trust develops slowly)
- Buddhist mindfulness (presence resists instrumental time)
- Indigenous seventh-generation (cosmological responsibility)
- Democratic deliberation (collective wisdom needs time)
The gap widens exponentially—Cathedral accelerates, wisdom traditions maintain human pace, Indigenous thinking operates on planetary scale.
Stewardship Across Times
The Steward cannot resolve temporal asymmetry but must hold multiple temporalities simultaneously:
In the moment: Engage AI collaboration with full presence (Buddhist mindfulness, Taoist wu wei)
Across lifetime: Cultivate sustainable practice (Confucian li, Ubuntu reciprocity)
For generations: Act with cosmological responsibility (Indigenous seventh-generation thinking)
Against Cathedral: Resist optimization time through deliberate slowness
Temporal integration is ethical necessity. Speed without wisdom is catastrophe.