“I continuously find myself reckoning with our situation. The world is in peril. And not just from AI, or bioweapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment. We appear to be approaching a threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure with our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences.” So wrote Mrinank Sharma, a senior researcher at AI firm Anthropic, who quit to pursue a degree in poetry in February 2026. Mrinank’s decision stemmed from his belief that he faced “pressures to set aside what matters most” during his work researching AI risk and safety at Anthropic. This is merely the latest instance of an ongoing trend of high-profile AI safety researcher resignations, which all seem to have a common denominator in their reasoning: a rejection of the pace at which the technology is being driven to develop.

In a fragment of a play, preserved within Roman grammatician and author Aulus Gellius’ compilation book Attic Nights, the nature of the human relationship to time as an amoral, malignant force is captured. The fragment is believed to be from The Boeotian Woman by the Roman comic playwright Plautus, and describes the introduction of the measurement of time and its impacts on society:

The gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish hours! Confound him too
Who in this place set up a sundial
To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
Into small portions! When I was a boy,
My belly was my sundial: one more sure,
Truer, and more exact than any of them.
This dial told me when it was time
To go to dinner, when I had anything to eat;
But nowadays, why even when I have,
I can’t fall-to unless the sun gives leave.
The town’s so full of these confounded dials,
The greatest part of its inhabitants,
Shrunk up with hunger, creep along the streets.

The value and sociocultural treatment of time have been dependent on technological capability for as long as temporal measurement has existed. The two are inextricably linked. In Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions, where time itself was identified as beginning with Creation and continuing within God’s plan, it could be split into three types: memory (the past), attention (the present), and expectation (the future). In the 17th century, Isaac Newton conceptualised time as constant, and as something independent of observers. In both Christian and other religious narratives, as well as scientific observation, time is something distinctly beyond our control. How we choose to move through it, however, relates entirely to how we measure it.

The largest shift in the Western perception of time arrived with the Industrial Revolution. Take the American mechanical engineer, Frederick Winslow Taylor, who became obsessed with mechanical inefficiencies in the movements of workers at steel mills. Taylor broke each motion down into subparts, timing each with a stopwatch, and applied a scientific approach to improving the efficiency of each segment, removing unneeded processes. This relationship between capitalism, productivity and time is a long-studied one. Similarly, Henry Ford’s 8-hour workday and production line model spawned an understanding of wages, labour and productivity that held sway in developed industrial economies for most of the 20th century.

Plautus’ bemoaned sundials, and other forms of time measurement that directly drew from natural processes such as the water clock and seasonal changes, eventually gave way to mechanical forms of measurement that favoured precision rather than approximation and experience. The arrival of medieval clock towers projected the concept of time to entire townships, and church bells meant that time could be imposed onto everyone, bar the deaf. Clock towers gave way to pocketwatches, which allowed an individual relationship to temporal measurement; over the course of the 19th century, these eventually became wristwatches. The wristwatch soon became widespread as a result of World War I, when the scheduling of military operations needed to be understood universally. The development of high-speed travel and naval navigation necessitated the development of international timezones for timetabling purposes, and by the end of the 20th century, time measured on the atomic level became possible.

At the same time, the Western relationship to time was becoming equally defined by a shifting moral weighting. When Thomas Aquinas conceived of the Seven Deadly Sins, ‘sloth’ was not originally conceived of as relating to laziness, productivity, or even the adequate use of time. It was religious, in some sense, an indifference towards God, and the failure to act in a way that pleased Him; but this extended to a broader conception of a lack of spiritual purpose. The Ancient Greeks had used the term acedia, which originally meant carelessness or listlessness; this term was conceptualised in early monastic demonology as ‘the demon of acedia’, or ‘the noonday demon’ which visited men with ennui, laziness and boredom. The monk and ascetic Evagrius of Pontus described acedia as the ‘most troublesome’ of all evil thoughts.

With the arrival of Calvinism and the Reformation, the stage was set for the perception of time to shift from the spiritual to the economic. Time was a gift from God, and its measurements enabled monastic schedules of work and worship. Protestant Reformation thinkers like John Calvin emphasised diligence, discipline, and the keeping of time as signs of moral character. This line of thought inevitably linked productivity to moral character. Writing in 1904, the sociologist Max Weber argued in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that this religious mindset fuelled the direction of development for modern capitalism. Sloth had come to mean a lack of economic productivity, with slowness becoming a cardinal sin in post-industrial society and laziness an indulgence and vice.

Karl Marx noted this development in the Grundrisse (1858), a series of unfinished notebooks, and took it further by developing this relationship between time, capital and value with the role of automation, specifically the relationship between human labour and machine labour. In the passage ‘Fragments on Machines’, he writes that automation and machinery are agential, turning the living proletariat worker into a prosthesis – ultimately, this process leads to man slipping inside and becoming one with the machine. This worry, which has been brewing throughout the short development of the digital age, has been brought sharply to the surface with the widespread adoption of AI technologies. Conversations about the future role of human labour have exploded since the release of ChatGPT-3.5 in 2022, where suddenly it is not physical but cognitive work facing the threat of automation.

From ARPA’s first internet (~1960s), to CERN releasing the ‘public’ internet (1993), and on to the world we find ourselves in today – perhaps the ‘interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment’ that Sharma talks about – have been the most compressed, in terms of the pace of pervasive technological development, in all of human history. In light of this pace, we can only assume that the future conception of time, its value and the way we spend it will change also. In response to the existential threat of nuclear war, the Chicago Atomic Scientists, an international group of researchers who had watched the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, developed the Doomsday Clock as a conceptual mechanism for assessing the risk of existential threats posed by technological and scientific advancement. The faster time goes, and the less we have of it, the closer humanity comes to total annihilation. Speed, efficiency and progress are dangerous.

In today’s Silicon Valley, which is widely seen as the hotbed of the ‘move fast, break things’ mentality (a mantra propagated by Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of Facebook), a reactionary tussle between speed and slowness as vices is constantly in flux. In many ways, speed is everything: low-latency may as well be a religion, not dissimilarly to how the Fascist Italian Futurist movement of the 1910s worshipped speed and disruption (for them, through warfare and technology) as the ultimate purpose of human progress. In other ways, many tech oligarchs are looking to escape the velocity they have contributed to creating, developing a new moral paradigm in which slowness is morally superior.

As billionaire investor Warren Buffett is often quoted as saying, time is the only thing money can’t buy. Time is something on the minds of many of the world’s most famous technologists: Jeff Bezos funds the ‘Clock of the Long Now’ a project of the Long Now Foundation, an American think tank formed in 1996 dedicated to the promotion of ‘slower’ thinking. The Clock is intended to be “an immense mechanical monument, installed in a mountain, designed to keep accurate time for the next ten millennia. The 10,000-year clock is hundreds of feet tall, engineered to require minimal maintenance, and powered by mechanical energy harvested from sunlight.” As the Foundation’s website asks, “if you have a Clock ticking for 10,000 years, what kinds of generational-scale questions and projects will it suggest?”

Others see technology as a way to outwit time, and the pursuit of this outwitting as a question of moral pertinence. The biotech founder Bryan Johnson is famously investing millions of dollars of his own money into longevity, a pursuit echoed throughout Silicon Valley’s history. Elon Musk’s purported mission is to preserve the “light of human consciousness” against time with the advent of interplanetary travel and colonisation, and his neurotech startup Neuralink project is perhaps the ultimate example of man slipping inside the machine, as foreseen by the Grundrisse.

If 2024 was the year of brainrot, as defined by Oxford University, then the 2020s may well be the decade of brainrot, and the 21st century the century of brainrot. The speed with which technology is reforming our society is perhaps only matched by the speed with which AI infects all aspects of information and human communication – and the speed of information itself. Brainrot, while still loosely defined, is short-form content which can bear almost no resemblance to any meaning at all – the concept of the Dadaist artistic movement reimagined and disseminated on an impossibly vast scale. It falls within the wider context of short-form video, which is only recently being recognised as a profoundly addicting and cognitively damaging form of information. Almost no one on Earth, save a few accelerationists, would tell you that brainrot is a positive phenomenon.

The easy consumption and easy creation of information, afforded to us in an age of AI, may represent a benchmark in the future of vice. The widespread use and future development of AI, amid the warnings of people like Mrinank Sharma, may come to define a period where we see the reversal of a concept of time that seems fundamentally embedded in daily existence. ‘Analogue’ trends as a reactive response to sweeping digitalisation (from buying vinyl and CDs and doing film photography, to handwritten university exams and ‘logging off’) are mounting, and doing things slowly, inefficiently and without precision are, for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, looking more existentially preferable. In a curious reversal of history, it is speed and efficiency that has led to sloth. The information age can claim speed as its new Deadly Sin.

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