On machines that answer faster than we do, and the moment we miss along the way.

Final stop this week, Zurich. I have stayed at this hotel several times, and my “Space Room” gives me the futuristic nudge I need for creative moments. I knew the room number stepped out of line with the three-digit 500-series rooms. But this time the number hits me at once: 2046. I notice it, I feel it, a thought takes shape. The number was on this door every time. This time it arrived.

2046 is the title of the film by Wong Kar-wai. In it, a writer tells a story about a train to 2046, a symbol of everything that never changes. The attendants on board are androids who feel, but their feelings arrive late. When they want to laugh, the smile comes much later, and when they want to cry, the tears come the next day. A man falls in love with one of them and waits for her answer. He hopes her feeling is only delayed.

tomorrowmensch, my experiment laid out over twenty years, leads exactly there. 2026 plus twenty is 2046. The longer I think about it, the more certain I am: in 2046 the question in the room will no longer be the one we ask today.

The machine is on time

We ask whether machines will learn to feel. Whether they have an inner life. Whether it feels like something, for them, to give an answer. In the meantime the machine has quietly solved a different problem, namely timing. Between two turns in a conversation, people leave a gap of about 200 milliseconds on average, and they do so across languages and cultures. A comparative study of ten languages showed this in 2009. By 2024, GPT-4o was already answering spoken language after roughly 320 milliseconds on average. So the machine speaks at our tempo. It is also learning to strike the right tone: consoling when we sound sad, excited when we are excited.

Whether it feels anything while doing so, nobody knows. And perhaps that is not even the decisive question. If it answers at our tempo, and does so in a way that makes no difference to us, what role is left for self-perception?

The feeling always comes late

What 2046 shows in its androids can be observed in humans too. Our feelings also arrive late. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio distinguishes between emotion and feeling. Emotion is the body’s reaction. It starts automatically. Heartbeat, breathing and muscle tension change, and different regions of the brain process and steer the event. Only afterwards are these changes mapped, in the insular cortex among other places, as an inner state we can experience. The part where it feels like something comes after. In that sense, feeling is the delayed perception of the reaction. The neurons fire, we project it onto what we call reality, and then we perceive it: it feels like something. Which makes the androids in the film deeply human.

The Greeks had two words for time. Chronos is measured time: the clock, the latency, the millisecond. Kairos is the right moment, the one you seize or miss. English keeps the difference in two small words: on time and in time. On time means fast enough for the clock. In time means before it is too late. For a feeling, in time is the moment it has arrived. Whoever wants to feel in time has to be able to wait for that moment. In chronos, the machine is on time. Whether we still feel in time is the open question.

The gap: the trigger may be a machine

With a sufficient understanding of chemistry and biology, it is reasonable to assume that we can produce emotions technologically. If a machine gives you goosebumps, the same chain is set in motion: the body reacts, the insular cortex maps it, it feels like something. The feeling cannot be goosed away. The emotion was triggered, the feeling is perceived. It is yours.

So the machine can’t be the problem? As a trigger, it isn’t. Music, film and literature have always produced feelings in us, and nobody considers those feelings less real. The trigger may be a machine. The answer may not. Because a feeling only becomes yours once it has arrived, and whether it arrives is decided in the time between reaction and answer. That time is exactly what is up for grabs today.

Between what happens inside us and how we respond lies a gap, perhaps even an emptiness. That is where we feel. That is where we decide whether to call or just send a message, whether to say something or stay silent. Our kairos lies in this gap. Feeling in time means keeping it open until the feeling has arrived, and only then answering.

This is precisely the gap the machine is moving into. Under every email the suggested reply is already waiting, and the condolence card has been written before we can even notice what we feel. Our expectations of technology rise, and our expectations of one another as human beings fade. The feeling still arrives. But by the time it does, the answer has long been sent. On time, but not in time.

The train is already running: the question for 2046

2046 is no longer fiction. It exists as a product. This is clearest where a feeling needs the most time to arrive: in grief. Griefbots answer in the voice and the sentences of the dead. Researchers in Cambridge have described how such deadbots can make it harder to come to terms with a loss. The loss no longer arrives, because the dead person still answers. And so the grief stays suspended. At a dinner this week I was confronted with exactly this scenario. The man next to me described the death of his father. The physical part wasn’t so important, he said, that chemical scum, as Stephen Hawking once called humanity. But he would like to talk to him again. That is the train to 2046, a place where nothing ever changes.

My ambition with tomorrowmensch is to build a human being, or to invest in exactly those technologies that bring us one step closer to that goal. My romantic notion is that I will fail. Because such a failure would bring the insight that a human is (still) more than, or other than, a machine. But tomorrowmensch comes with a condition, one that gets lost quickly in all the talk of qubits and biological substrates: we must not lose our self-perception, and we must not let it be overwritten.

The experiment can fail, and we can still lose. For that, the machine does not need to feel. It is enough that we have forgotten how to feel in time. That we can no longer bear the gap in which the feeling arrives, and would rather fill it with a ready-made answer. Can we still live a fulfilled life then?

In the film, only a single passenger ever returns from 2046, because he stops looking for an answer there. The room in Zurich is quiet. No train, no androids, just the phone on my nightstand, already suggesting three replies. On time, every one of them. Today I write my own.

We have twenty years.