On June 30 2015 at 23:59:59 UTC (19:59:59 EDT), artist Sara Morawetz was standing in the middle of New York’s Times Square with a pair of cymbals. As the clock ticked to the next second, she struck the cymbals together.

This simple performance, titled 61/60, sought to highlight the strange blip of time where the clock read 23:59:60 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), instead of 00:00:00 UTC.

Since 1972, extra seconds, known as leap seconds, have been added to clock time whenever our slightly wobbly Earth falls out of sync with atomic clocks (which run more consistently). A total of 27 leap seconds have been added in those five decades.

They are therefore important in fields like astronomy because they keep the link between clock time and solar time – which is based on our planet’s movement.

But on Thursday 15 October, delegates at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) in Versailles, France, voted to abolish them, starting from 2027.

Their loss might seem trivial to some people. But in the field of precision timekeeping, leap seconds are highly controversial. They have the potential to affect everything from financial trading, telecommunications and the energy sector to data centres and the legal system.

In fact, they have threatened to interrupt any sector that requires accurate timing. For example, data centres use time synchronisation to ensure distributed servers work together effectively. In finance, time stamps ensure orders are carried out accurately and provide an audit trail for complying with regulations.

When a leap second was added in 2012, it caused websites such as Reddit and Linkedin to crash and Qantas airline flights to be delayed.

In the reporting on today’s decision, these risks to computing systems are often described as the main reason for the end of leap seconds, but in fact the risk was to the single globally accepted standard of time.

Big tech concerns

In 2008, when a leap second was due to be added to the clock on December 31, Google was unwilling to risk adding it in a single step. Instead, the tech giant’s time servers deviated from UTC for a period of 20 hours, “smearing” the extra second across this time period in increments that were so small their systems did not notice them.

Effectively, Google determined that UTC was not suitable for its needs and invented its own form of clock time in response. Increasingly, other corporations adopted their own workarounds, raising concerns about the ability of UTC to retain its position as the pre-eminent determination of time.

As a result, conversations within the international bodies responsible for standardisation have, in recent years, focused on the ways that the current model of clock time no longer works as a standard for all.

As Mario Maniewicz, director of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU-R), has argued, clock time needs to be updated so that it can meet the needs of 21st century users.

At the 2022 CGPM, it had already been agreed by delegates that, by 2035, UTC would effectively be free of leap seconds. However, recent predictions of future changes in Earth’s rotation raised the possibility of the first negative leap second, where a second is subtracted rather than added to the clock.

Alarm over the unprecedented impact this situation could have led to it being likened to a new Y2K event. The increased risk of losing users of UTC to forms of timekeeping that do not require leap second adjustments led to the proposal agreed at Versailles, namely to bring forward the end of leap seconds to May 20 2027.

Meeting needs

UTC has thus been redefined so that it can be reasserted as a shared standard, free of the controversy it once held for many economic activities.

As I’ve argued previously, the leap second debate has shown that our usual ideas of clocks as abstract, mathematical and objective are incorrect. These ideas do not take into account the way that clocks are designed tools that are reformulated when needs shift.

Global computing and tech companies now have the time they need for their systems to work more smoothly. But astronomers will no longer be able to use UTC as a broad proxy for the Earth’s rotation as they did before. The proposal brought before the CGPM mentions this, but more or less says they will need to look elsewhere for their requirements.

The implication of the decision seems to be that computing needs have been placed above the requirements of other sectors. But the larger question raised by today’s decision at the CGPM is one the broader public has rarely asked, namely what other “user needs” are going unmet by the assumption that all human activities can be coordinated by a single standardised clock time? Astronomy provides one example of this, but our own experiences of pressure and anxiety around time suggest there are others.

Can we reinvent time?

There is a strange kind of audacity in even considering the idea of changing clock time to suit our own needs. Google was able to do it in part because it is big enough to do so.

But think about the common habit of running our clocks slightly fast to help with getting to meetings on time. This is done so often that Apple had to introduce an official feature to its smart watch allowing people to set it to the wrong time on purpose.

Public clocks do this occasionally too, such as the turret clock on the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh. Since 1902, the clock has run three minutes fast to help travellers arrive on time at the nearby Waverley train station. There are also clocks that let you track time outside of the UTC standard that was redefined today.

Designer Scott Thrift has built a clock called The Present which features a single hand that moves with the changing seasons across a full year. Thrift described The Present as “no hours, no minutes, no numbers. Only the bigger picture”. US scientists working on Mars missions created their own watches to track Martian days (called sols) which run longer than Earth days.

Many people may think of clock time as immovable and inevitable. As the latest vote shows, the “shape” of the clock remains up for debate. Currently, if you are big enough it will bend to your needs. We need to decide if we are happy to just leave the big players to it.

Michelle Bastian does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The AI doomsday news cycle plays on anxieties about the future. The media has tended to prioritise sensational takes on the risk at the expense of more thoughtful opinions by, for example, experts in the ethics of AI.

Alarmist fantasies of superintelligence – where artificial intelligence surpasses that of the most gifted human minds – are criticised for distracting from real concerns and threats. AI is energy hungry, environmentally damaging, and has prompted urgent calls for legislation relating to a slew of ethical concerns.

Apocalyptic AI visions drawn from science fiction engage public interest. One fascinating scenario can be found in the 2018 movie Annihilation, starring Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac. The film is being released in the 4K Ultra HD home media format in the UK and US in October.

Annihilation features an “alien intelligence” – a popular analogy for AI among tech leaders – which embeds itself within Earth’s environment. Can such visions be useful to the current real-world doomsday debate?

Sci-fi could help reframe the real-world narrative in positive ways. There are strange techno-futurist and eugenicist visions at play within Silicon Valley, which appear popular with some tech billionaires.

These are linked to dark enlightenment thinking – a movement that rejects liberal democracy and egalitarianism – as well as effective altruism (attempting to impartially calculate benefits to provide the greatest good). These visions encompass long-term perspectives that accept present-day sacrifice for future wellbeing.

The future-oriented visions expressed by some tech leaders can be surreal, but they reflect the belief systems fuelling the drive for AI superintelligence. And that raises important questions, right now, about whose vision of the future we are investing in.

Alex Garland’s sci-fi horror film Annihilation takes us into these issues through one of the weirdest sci-fi visions that’s out there. It is loosely adapted from a novel by Jeff VanderMeer.

Termed the Shimmer, because it radiates energy, the AI steadily expands its reach (starting from Florida swampland) by operating as a networked entity beyond human control. It changes everything within its domain. People, animals, and plants mutate in unpredictable ways, seemingly infected by a strange parasite.

The story focuses on an expedition team, including genetics expert Lena (Portman), who enter the Shimmer seeking answers. They discover that all electromagnetic waves and DNA are being disrupted and reconfigured.

The Shimmer is interfering with the fundamental patterns of life, redefining evolutionary code. Among other things, the Shimmer learns to clone humans. This enables it to exist within human-type bodies anywhere on Earth.

Both extinction and immortality

Annihilation toys with different types of human extinction. Terminal extinction refers to humanity dying out while leaving a successor species, a bit like the concept of a human’s consciousness being uploaded onto a machine. Final extinction is when humanity ends, full stop.

When tech billionaires stumble over questions about wanting humanity to endure, they are probably thinking of terminal extinction. Surreal as it sounds, this magical thinking is a recurrent feature of the AI landscape.

Annihilation leaves the viewer to decide which form of human termination is occurring. The film draws on Garland’s deep fascination with AI. His debut as a director, Ex Machina, explored a humanoid robot passing the Turing test and breaking free from human control.

His television series Devs visualises a world where a quantum supercomputer has “godlike” capabilities.

Annihilation’s organic body horror uses imagery of destroyed, mutated, and cloned bodies to reflect profound social anxiety about humanity’s future. As Garland himself has suggested in an interview, there is a form of digital spirituality fuelling the tech billionaire drive for AI superintelligence and his sci-fi work explores this concept in various ways.

AI as parasite

Annihilation is weird but it makes sense through the parasite theory of communication. The French philosopher and historian of science Michel Serres expanded upon biological parasites to develop a media and communications theory. In it, he argued that all forms of interaction involve disruption and noise.

Whether intentional or not, within every interaction there is always some kind of human or non-human disruption at play. Think in terms of glitches and interference while using digital devices, background noise, changeable environments, uninvited guests and any other distraction. According to Serres’ idea, these can all be visualised as forms of parasite feeding on attempts to interact.

In some instances, the parasite takes over – the disruptor displaces the host. If the impact of a parasitical disruptor is significant, it can change society forever. Disruption is a popular term in technology, and AI can be seen as a global disruptor.

But disruption shouldn’t be viewed as inherently negative. In fact, disruption is generally considered a form of positive change because it offers new tools, systems and processes that displace the current methods and structures available to humans in everyday life.

But it raises the key issue of whose interests, ethics and beliefs are being propagated and served by the impact of AI as a disruptor. Annihilation visualises a parasitical disruptive force embedded within the environment, which invites comparison with the darker areas of techno-futuristic visions from Silicon Valley and beyond. Like the Shimmer, AI is not going away; it just keeps changing form.

More importantly, Annihilation shows how small-scale changes can build towards global impacts. The story to engage with isn’t the fantasy that AI superintelligence is about to dominate humanity – it’s the one about disruption and whether that is a net positive or negative for human society.

Changing how we think about and use AI requires critically examining it, disrupting the fantasy narrative, and redefining the discourse and direction of travel of this world-changing technology.

What Annihilation tells us is that becoming a disruptor can change our future visions and current realities in a positive way. It helps us see possibilities for a technological future that move beyond the human extinction trope.

Kevin Hunt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.