Interesting article from IEEE Spectrum: "How AI’s Sense of Time Will Differ From Ours" [Popovski, 2026-08-13].
Human cognition integrates events from different senses - especially seeing and hearing - using a temporal window of integration (TWI). Among other things, it's the ability that lets us see continuous motion with synchronized sound in old school films at 24 frames per second. But under the hood, everything is asynchronous with different sensing and processing latencies. Which is why we don't automatically integrate seeing distant lightning strikes with the thunderclap, even though intellectually we may know they're the same event.
Machines have to deal with this as well, especially AI in applications like self-driving vehicles. It's non-trivial. "Computers put timestamps, nature does not" as the author remarks. Anyone that develops real-time software - or has spent time analyzing log files - has already had to think about this. I talked about this issue in a prior blog article: "Frames of Reference".
I've also pointed out in a prior article, "Frames of Reference III", that our human sense of simultaneity continuously gives us a false view of reality. If I look towards the back of my kitchen, I see the breakfast table and chairs a few feet away. Since light travels about a foot per nanosecond, I'm actually seeing events that occurred a few nanoseconds ago (plus the communication and processing latency inside me). The back yard that I can see through the window: a few tens of nanoseconds ago. The house across the street: a hundred nanoseconds ago. The mountains to the west: microseconds ago. If I can see the moon on a clear evening: over a second ago. I see all of these things as existing in the same instant of time, but nothing could be further from the truth; my perception is at best an ensemble of many instants in the past, and the present is just an illusion.
AI perception of the real-world will have similar complications.
