The Liberated Time. Ethics and Fragility.

Deodato Salafia
Nov 9
7 min read

“Which of you by worrying can add one hour to his life?” (Matthew 6:27)

The promise of technology is always the same: to liberate time. For centuries we have been building tools to shorten work, accelerate processes, and reduce fatigue. Artificial intelligence brings this tension to a peak: it thinks, calculates, writes, and decides. It gives us back hours, and with them a subtle illusion—that of finally being able to dispose of time. But is time possessed? Or only traversed? Does it grow like capital, or open up like a landscape? Perhaps every liberated hour is a passage, not a possession.

The Time of Machines and the Time of Man

The time of the machine is perfect, continuous, without hesitation. It knows no interruptions, does not remember, does not wait. It is a time of pure execution. Human time, however, is fragile, made of pauses and restarts, of slowness and voids. It is the time of waiting, of error, of memory: a time that does not merely flow, but happens. When a machine frees an hour for us, a choice opens up: we can use it to multiply efficiency, or to listen to everything that efficiency does not know and that can be explored precisely thanks to this new hour. The time we save becomes, paradoxically, the place where our freedom, or excess, is measured. Liberated time is not a neutral gain: it is a moral responsibility. Hannah Arendt recalled that freedom is not “being liberated from something,” but acting for something. Artificial intelligence can execute, but it cannot choose; it can free minutes, but not meaning. We might wonder what meaning is, and we would arrive at consciousness, and we know there is no way to define consciousness (in practice, all the articles in this column revolve around this point). What is certain is that time has a central role for the biological man, who knows perfectly when he wasn't there, when he won't be, and when his loved ones won't be. This can never belong to machines, because machines do not age and are not born; as formalisms, they have always existed—on this, one should see the theorems of Alan Turing.

The Colonization of Liberated Time

Yet, the time that technology gives us back rarely remains empty enough to be inhabited. Byung-Chul Han lucidly described the paradox of our age: we live in the "society of tiredness," where we are no longer exploited by an external master, but by ourselves. The contemporary subject, Han writes, is simultaneously "executioner and victim"—he self-exploits believing he is free. The time liberated by automation does not become creative idleness, but a new opportunity for performance. We answer emails while the algorithm prepares the report; we listen to podcasts while the AI processes data; we produce content in the time once dedicated to reflection. Technological efficiency has not freed us from fatigue; it has multiplied it: it has made us capable of doing ever more, and thus obligated us to do it. The machine saves our time so that we can fill it with more work. The boundary between productive time and free time no longer exists: everything is potentially optimizable, performative, and measurable. The liberated time immediately becomes captured time. Han notes that this colonization is even more insidious than classic exploitation because it presents itself as freedom. There is no master compelling us: we choose to check notifications, to constantly update ourselves, to stay connected. Technology does not oppress us from the outside; it persuades us from within that we could do more, be more, optimize more. In this context, artificial intelligence is not the solution, but the intensification of the problem. Every activity we delegate gives us back time that is immediately filled with new possibilities for production. We never truly rest, because rest itself becomes a missed opportunity. The time liberated by machines is already mortgaged before we even receive it. The tiredness Han speaks of is not that of the body exhausted by physical labor, but that of the psyche overloaded with possibilities. It is the tiredness of having to constantly choose, optimize, and decide how to use every minute liberated. It is a tiredness without possible rest, because the problem is not external—it is not enough to stop working—but internal: we have internalized the imperative of continuous performance.

Chronos and Kairos

Christian philosophy distinguishes two faces of time. Chronos, the time that is measured; and Kairos, the time that is fulfilled. The first belongs to the machine: linear, predictable, repeatable. The second is the time of happening, of encounter, of revelation. Artificial intelligence amplifies chronos but remains blind to kairos: it does not know the moment that transforms, the silence that reveals, the word that changes the course of a day. Yet, this is precisely the time of life: the time that is not programmed, but received.

The Temptation of Digital Immortality

There is another promise that runs through contemporary technological discourse, more radical than mere efficiency: that of overcoming the limit of biological time itself. If artificial intelligence gives us back hours, transhumanism promises to give us back years, decades, perhaps centuries. The uploading of consciousness, the indefinite extension of life through genetic editing or human-machine integration: all these perspectives share a single fantasy, that of finally adding hours to life, against the Gospel's verdict. But does more chronos truly mean more life? Or just more duration? The question is not whether technology can extend our biological existence—it probably can and will do so increasingly. The question is whether the added time is necessarily time lived, or merely accumulated time. An existence of a thousand years, but emptied of kairos, would not be life: it would be iteration, replica, the quantitative extension of a form that has lost its qualitative intensity. Technological immortality is the supreme fantasy of chronos: an infinite time, perfectly available, always extendable. But kairos, by its nature, cannot be extended. The opportune moment does not last longer if we live longer; the decisive encounter does not become deeper if we have centuries ahead. In fact, it could be the opposite: finitude is the condition of meaning. Knowing that time ends is what makes every moment unrepeatable, every choice heavy with weight, every encounter unique. Machines do not age. An algorithm executed today is identical to one executed a century ago, if the code does not change. There is no memory that fades, body that weakens, voice that grows faint. The machine does not know its own time because it does not know its own end. We, instead, inhabit time because we know we do not have it infinitely. We know we woke up one day without remembering the before, and one day we will fall asleep without seeing the after. We know that those we love will not always be here, and this—not the length of the years—is what makes every shared moment precious. The promise of digital immortality, then, is not only unrealizable due to technical limitations. It is philosophically ambiguous: it would like to give us more time, but risks taking away precisely what makes time human—its fragility, its scarcity, its being a gift and not a possession. The Gospel does not speak of surrender, but of measure. We cannot add an hour to life because life does not stretch, it fulfills. Technology extends our capacity to do, but not our capacity to be.

The Attention Economy and Time Never Truly Free

But even without reaching transhumanist fantasies, the time that artificial intelligence gives us back is already subject to a subtle form of expropriation. As soon as the machine frees us from a task, other technologies capture that suddenly available attention. The contemporary economy is no longer primarily based on the production of goods, but on the capture of human time. Digital platforms are designed to hold our gaze for as long as possible. The paradox is evident: AI saves us half an hour at work, and we spend that half-hour scrolling through content that another algorithm has selected for us. The liberated time is never truly free, because it has already been assigned—not by an external master, but by architectures of choice that seem neutral yet orient, channel, and retain. This colonization is all the more effective the more invisible it is. No one forces us to stay online, yet we do, because the digital environment is built to make it difficult to stop. Time is no longer seized by the assembly line, but dispersed into a thousand micro-distractions that together form hours, days, entire lives. The liberated time, then, is never simply "given." It is contested space, where a game is played involving our capacity for attention, our decisional autonomy, our possibility of truly encountering ourselves and others. Perhaps the answer lies not in rejecting technology, but in recognizing that liberated time is an ambiguous gift. It can become a space of authentic freedom only if we learn to defend it from colonization—that of continuous performance and that of infinite entertainment. Only if we accept that some moments must not be filled, optimized, or justified. Only if we recognize that human time is not a resource to be managed, but a landscape to be traversed with attention, slowness, and presence. The machine offers us chronos. It is up to us to guard the kairos—the time in which something happens that no efficiency can program and no immortality can prolong. The time of encounter, of the word listened to, of inhabited silence. The time that is not added, but fulfilled.

Bibliography

Hannah Arendt The Human Condition, Bompiani, Milan 1989 (orig. ed. 1958)

Byung-Chul Han The Burnout Society, Nottetempo, Milan 2012 (orig. ed. Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, 2010) Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, Nottetempo, Milan 2016 (orig. ed. Psychopolitik, 2014) In the Swarm: Digital Prospects, Nottetempo, Milan 2015 (orig. ed. Im Schwarm, 2013)