The Ministry of Time: Coordinating Societal Rhythms through Automation

How will time be conceptualized in the future? Ministry of Time is a futuristic concept derived from anticipatory anthropology, which emerged in the ethnographic research in Poland conducted in the project "Choreography of time: Cultural practices of time management". The project involved 60 interviews about time management. We live in a society with many rhythms. In everyday life, we often have to navigate between conflicting and uncoordinated time frames. Furthermore, leisure time is inequitably distributed in many societies. As a result of this situation, all the consequences are transferred to the individual. The way we deal with the constant lack of time and acceleration is up to each of us. To deal with desynchronized time rhythms, many of my interviewees dream of automating their time management decisions. The idea is that AI can guide them to better decisions by learning their human behavior. A „digital assistant” could help them organize their lives. „Intelligent software” could decide what is urgent and important. The Ministry of Time is a future idea that emerged from interviews. As a result of the time policy, the Ministry would coordinate and synchronize social time on a systemic level: specify the hours when offices are available, as well as the working, consumption, and rest hours. Organize them so that they don't interfere with each other as they currently do. It would gather data about individuals' time and manage system time for the Ministry using automated decision-making. Ministry of Time has been found to be useful by my interlocutors. Traffic jams are created by common working hours, which causes overlapping time rhythms. Services, such as medical clinics, stores, offices, and museums, are open during working hours. How does all of this make sense? A desire to change these rhythms led to the idea of the Ministry of Time. However, my interlocutors also see the dangers of this approach. The Ministry of Time will construct temporal behavioral patterns and steer society's time. Some people may feel uncomfortable when they realize that they are entrusting so much power to algorithms. Their concern is that they may violate their privacy. A lack of trust in these systems' objectivity and their usage of data is not unjustified. The algorithms used by social networks provide a good example of the dangers associated with data collection mechanisms built into applications. The usage of this data to shape opinions and personalize advertising is already widely known. It is to be expected that the data collected by our virtual assistant on our time organization patterns will also be subject to trade in the era of cognitive capitalism. In my presentation, I will discuss the opportunities and risks of applying automated decision making to social time coordination. In addition, I will explore whether people are willing to surrender control to an outside entity in favor of intelligent time management and social time algorithms.