By: Samantha Borcy
Erika Debrah Reed spends her professional life predicting the future of commerce and understanding human behavior at one of the world’s largest retail organizations, advising premier venture capital firms, and working at the intersection of commercial real estate and transportation. She holds a civil engineering degree from Bucknell, an engineering management degree from Northwestern’s McCormick School, and an MBA from Kellogg. When someone with that specific combination of technical training and strategic intelligence writes a book about what AI means for human purpose, it is worth paying attention to.
What Reed found, and what The Gift of Time documents across nine chapters and an epilogue, is that the most important question raised by artificial intelligence is not which jobs it will eliminate or which companies will profit most from its deployment or even which regulatory frameworks will govern its use. The most important question is the one that Tolkien’s Gandalf posed in The Fellowship of the Ring and that Reed has made the animating purpose of her book: what will we do with the time that is given us, especially when we are given considerably more of it?
She earns the right to ask that question by spending the first chapter establishing, through a rigorous tour of philosophical thinking from Plato to Einstein, exactly what time is and what it means for human beings to inhabit it well. That philosophical foundation gives everything that follows a depth and a seriousness that distinguishes this book from more superficial treatments of the same territory. When Reed writes about autonomous vehicles returning commuting time to human use, she is not talking about productivity optimization. She is talking about the quality of experience and the density of memory that distinguishes a life that feels fully lived from one that merely passes. That is a different and considerably more important conversation.
The book is organized as a journey outward from the intimate to the civilizational, from the individual’s daily relationship with time through the transformation of commuting through the emergence of humanoid robots through the automated future of aviation through the autonomous divide through the education renaissance through the philosophy of curiosity itself. Each chapter adds a new dimension to the central argument, and the five-minute reflections that punctuate every section keep returning the reader to the personal question that all of this is ultimately about: what would you do with the time that is being returned to you?
Reed writes with the warmth and the intellectual confidence of someone who has thought carefully about these questions for a long time and who genuinely believes the answers matter. The Gift of Time is the book she was always going to write, and the moment she has chosen to write it is exactly right.
If you want to understand what someone with the specific combination of engineering rigor, strategic intelligence, and humanistic depth that Erika Debrah Reed brings has concluded about what AI means for human purpose, The Gift of Time is waiting for you on Amazon. Head over and get your copy today, and start asking the question the book was written to help you answer.
