AI firms, to be clear, are engaged in well-intentioned attempts to expand human knowledge, spur scientific breakthroughs, inform decision-making, and facilitate or automate tasks. But, as with most businesses, the essential driver behind these companies is to turn a profit, to amass revenue and power by monetizing the lives, labor, and accumulated learning of others. And when money or power are the overriding motivations, the more fundamental human pursuits—no matter how noble, socially beneficial, or life-affirming—fall by the wayside.

It reminds me of an observation made by the artist and critic John Menick, apropos of a series of images captured on 9/11 by fellow artist Wolfgang Staehle. Beginning on September 6, for an exhibition titled “2001,” Staehle used a remote, stationary webcam to render still photos of the downtown skyline every four seconds and automatically send them to a computer, then to a projector, which beamed each image, mural-size, on an art gallery wall. By happenstance, Staehle managed to capture a visual sequence of the planes hitting the towers, the towers collapsing, and on and on. Staehle’s exhibition was meant to get at the sum and substance of the concept of “real time.” (Staehle’s gallery show not only recorded the World Trade Center scene, but, on two other walls, a former Benedictine monastery near Staehle’s hometown and a Berlin TV transmitter—the panoramas shifting slightly as time ticked along.) But instead of depicting the Zen-like connectivity of what I call global simultaneity—the ability to witness identical events, worldwide—Staehle had inadvertently chronicled the deadliest terror attack in modern history.

Menick also saw something else. In his view, society’s obsession with calibrating units of time had begun in 1955 with the invention of the atomic clock. According to Menick, from that single development, the world was forever altered. “The second would help generate all spatial standards, from the threading of screws to the size of cargo containers,” he contended. “Space travel, all scientific research, and eventually the entire edifice of international standards would rest upon the second’s refinement.” What, then, was the force behind this single-minded drive for accuracy? “Marxists might point to international capital’s need for quicker transactions, and they are probably more or less correct,” Menick observed. “When in doubt, look for the profit motive.”