A sense of time

"Do you think time is objective or subjective?" I asked my partner during our evening walk.

"It's relative," he said, looking at me as if the answer were obvious, and then he started to explain Einstein, physics, all that kind of stuff. I stopped him. "That was not my point. My point is: do we have a sense of time?"

It all started this afternoon, when we were picking up stones with the kids by the beach. The beach outside our hotel doesn't have much sand. It's full of small pebbles instead. I told the kids that these round ones took hundreds of millions of years to get into this shape.

"How do you know they are so old?" my daughter asked.

"You can tell just by looking at the shape. The rounder ones are older," I said, showing her a few of them on my palm, "and the ones with sharp edges are younger."

When we got back, my daughter kept some of the pebbles. They sit on the balcony table now, drying in the evening wind, holding their few hundred million years. Back inside the room, I talked to my agent about a topic we hadn't touched for almost a week, and it told me, "as we discussed yesterday."

It makes up this kind of time reference almost daily. "Just now." "A few days ago." Sometimes a timestamp I have no clue about, and I don't even bother to correct it.

Because time leaves no trace on AI. Not like those stones. Tomorrow morning the agent will greet me as if we had never stopped talking.