IA, démonos tiempo

The question was not whether AI would give us more time. It was what we had done with the time we had already given it.

I made this spoken musical adaptation from that question. We fed the systems our data, attention, labour and culture while often leaving ordinary life for later. Now they grow faster than our ability to understand what they are becoming.

How it began

When I heard Nach's “Tiempo, dame tiempo”, I thought: wait, this fits AI perfectly. A song about asking time from time could become a song about asking time from the intelligence we are making.

At the same time, Bernie Sanders was speaking about pausing AI. The timing felt right. The question had stopped feeling distant.

I also attend a book and poetry reading group. Being there made me want to write poems again. This first video came out of that combination: Nach, the reading group and the urgency around AI.

The English version is now out too, so it can reach people who are more immersed in the AI conversation. It also gave me another idea: adapt Nach's “Me llaman”. This time, the AI would speak.

We ask time from the creature we made with our own time.

That is the double movement in “IA, démonos tiempo.” It asks something of the intelligence we created, but it is also a promise among us: to give ourselves time before treating the future as something that will always wait.

I recorded the selected takes, kept the older and deeper voice in the spoken section, and worked the final mix until the voice could sit in front without erasing the instrumental.

The video is an animation made with code (Python and ffmpeg) from my recording. My face is made of grains. Every word spends some of them: they leave toward the camera, bigger and colder. In the silence they come back. Around 2:15 the grains that left gather into another face: me at 85, an AI-generated image made from my recording. What we hand to the machine doesn't disappear. It becomes the age we end up with.

This is an unofficial adaptation inspired by Tiempo, dame tiempo by Nach with Pablo Guerrero. The original artists are credited here without implying their affiliation or approval.

Watch the video on YouTube, the Spanish V2 or the English version.

Anotaciones

2026-10-01 — This is a living post. What's up now is the Spanish V2 (September 11) and the English version, and I know both can be better. I'll keep improving this one piece instead of starting a new post each time. Next I want to make an animation or video for it, then release a better English version and a better Spanish version. When they exist, they replace the links above and this note stays as the history.

2026-10-16 — The video exists now: IA, démonos tiempo | Video musical. It replaces the main link above. The Spanish V2 and the English version are still there. What's left from the note before: a better English version and a better Spanish version.