Over coffee yesterday [1 a decaf, believe it or not] I was moaning about how good it would be to be able to pause time so that I could get my work done. Something a bit like the way that Bill and Ted do at the end of Bogus Journey.
We set up the rule that even if you were to go into frozen time, you couldn’t bring anyone with you, and you’d keep ageing at a normal rate; a bit like if you were in light speed travel.
It brings up some interesting issues. If it was free to freeze time for the rest of the works, and it was something that everyone had access to, then ‘normal’ would change pretty quickly to accommodate it. The first thing that people would probably do is sleep in frozen time as sleep has no interaction value. The constraint of not being able to take anyone with you shifts the focus onto entirely interaction free time - the kind of things that you could do in a cabin in the woods or on a plane. This would mean that large portions of office work where you didn’t need to interact with anyone else could be done in frozen time.
One interesting aspect of this is that we would imagine that current ‘elites’ would spend most of their time in real time coordinating and communicating others who are performing in frozen time, thereby making freezing your time a lower status thing to do. This needn’t be the case though, as someone who is competent in doing something could do it in frozen time, and then spend as much time as is needed coordinating with others in real time[2 This would free up the problem of promoted to the level of your own incompetence.].
The main thing that is tricky about this is the ability to value effort. Currently all occupy the same time, and time has long been considered a universal currency[3 Adam Smith spends a fair bit of the start of the wealth of nations going through this] but it would need to fall to a system of valuing results rather than time taken to perform tasks if the time an external observer perceived between setting the task and it being completed was zero.
I can see lots more implications of this, mainly coming from time:money:information related interactions. Oddly[4 most things that Robin does can be accompanied by ‘oddly] Robin Hanson mentioned something related in his post about em speed today, so it must be something that sci if has explored at some point.