Discretionary lifetime is what a society could gain when machines reduce how much human lifetime production requires. Industrial civilization consumes vast portions of a life because production needs it; an AI ecology could return large parts of that time — which may be the transition’s greatest gift or one of its worst disasters.
The freed time could go toward relationships, art, learning, research, care, exploration, physical development, projects, community, and contemplation — or into machine-generated stimulation streams. So the AI ecology may pair unprecedented time abundance with unprecedented attention capture, and the difference between them is not decided by the time itself but by what a society builds to receive it. This is why the framework cares about aliveness and the right to informational quiet as much as about resources: time freed is not the same as time lived. See The Human Transition.