The lived kind

Of course I did the obvious thing and asked my agent if it has a sense of time.

It said it could reason about time. It sees the date, it can do the arithmetic. What it doesn't have is "the feeling of time passing". Whether my next reply comes in ten seconds or ten days, for it, it's all the same.

That is the part. There is no "waiting" in there.

It explains why it keeps making up timestamps that make no sense. For it, nothing has been a while.

Those made up timestamps are not even lies. It just doesn't know that it doesn't know. And somehow, I find that comforting. AI seems to know everything. Maybe I have found one thing it doesn't?

Unlike us. We can feel time passing. It leaves its trace on us, like the way it did on those pebbles on the beach. Even though we get it wrong too. A summer for an eight-year-old boy could feel like it lasted forever. A day full of activities on holiday can feel much longer than a regular day at home.

Relative, my partner said the other day. That night we went out to look at the stars. Fifteen minutes, we thought. It was almost an hour.