The washing machine, the automobile, the fax machine, the cell phone… and now, artificial intelligence. All these fantastic technological advances should, in principle, save us a lot of time. So what ?
“In theory, it is true that technology could free us from certain painful tasks,” says Mario Ionuț Maroșan, doctoral student in political philosophy at the University of Montreal, joined in Paris, where he continues his studies. “But what do we do with this freed up time? There are always more and more things to do. »
The student cites the work of German philosopher Hartmut Rosa, who examined the phenomenon of “social acceleration,” a concept at the heart of which is the need to do more things in less time. The stronger the acceleration, the more time becomes a scarce commodity, the more stress it causes.
But “contrary to a widely held hypothesis, technology is not itself the cause of social acceleration,” writes Rosa in her work (notably Acceleration – A social critique of time, published in 2013). In the industrial age, as in the digital age, technological revolutions have always aimed to respond to the problem of lack of time.
Rosa notes that “technical” acceleration (i.e. the increase in output per unit of time, for example, the increase in the number of kilometers traveled in so many minutes, the number of bytes downloaded per second, the number of clothes washed in one wash load) should, in principle, lead to an increase in free time. And if an individual has more free time, their pace of life slows down and stress decreases.
However, it is not the case. For what ? Because the number of tasks to be accomplished increases at the rate of technical acceleration, and even beyond. If your task was to process 10 mail messages in two hours in the 1990s, you will be able to process 50 messages in 2024 using email. But you will still have to devote two hours a day to it, or even much more.
So the gain in free time is… zero? If you’re not careful, that’s what happens.
What does Hartmut Rosa propose to review our relationship with time? The philosopher does not advocate so much a “slowdown” or a way of “doing less”, but rather a concept of “resonance” or a way of “doing better”, explains Mario Ionuț Maroșan.
Resonance, according to Rosa, is becoming aware of what surrounds us, feeling the noises, walking in the forest and paying attention to nature. “It’s a relationship with time that is not as revolutionary as that of slowing down,” says the student. The “slowdown”, even “degrowth”, says Mr. Maroșan, “could lead to a political revolution for which not everyone is ready…”