AI and the End of Territorial Time
AI and the End of Territorial Time
https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/ai-and-the-end-of-territorial-time/
Publish Date: 2026-03-23 10:02:00
Source Domain: www.rstreet.org
The arc of human technological progress can be described as a long campaign against the limits imposed by time. Paleolithic humans stole a few uncertain hours from the night with smoky fires. Gaslight stretched the evening further. Railroads and ocean navigation forced continents to agree on the hour. Electricity turned night into a simulacrum of day. These shifts matter because historians of deep structural change rarely begin with ideology or politics but look instead to daily rhythms. When societies reorganize how people mark and measure a day, deeper transformations follow. After the Black Death, English laborers began treating time itself as something that could be bought and sold. The Second Industrial Revolution demanded precision to the minute, disciplining life to factory clocks, school schedules, and centralized grids.
Now a global digital network infused with artificial intelligence may inaugurate another chapter—not by simply extending the day or demanding finer synchronization, but by altering the relationship between time and geography that has structured human life. Territorial time is losing authority as time zones matter less for participation: Even before the pandemic, one major study of an international firm showed that over 40 percent of meetings took place outside of at least one person’s normal business hours. Responsiveness drifts toward the instantaneous, even when interaction is asynchronous. And physical presence, though far less necessary for coordination, may be reemerging as a signal of authenticity. Together, these developments suggest the outlines of a new temporal order.
When railroads and governments standardized time zones in the nineteenth century, they did more than coordinate trains. They ordered daily life. Television programs were advertised separately for Eastern and Pacific audiences. Shops opened and closed according to territorial clocks. Long-distance communication was costly…
