https://arab.news/py3qh
The debate about artificial intelligence remains overwhelmingly focused on three key questions: Which jobs will disappear? Which skills will endure? And are current valuations justified? But these questions, while important, obscure a deeper one: What will replace time as the measure of value and who will control it?
For two centuries, time has been capitalism’s organizing principle. In his 1967 essay “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” the British historian E.P. Thompson showed how the factory system replaced task-based labor with the discipline of the clock, enforced by bells, timetables and moral exhortations against “wasting time.” Under this arrangement, workers sold hours and employers purchased them. Labor laws were structured around the eight-hour workday and pensions were determined by years of service.
The clock established a shared metric: an hour meant the same thing everywhere, for everyone. Because time was standardized, exploitation could be measured. And because it could be measured, it could be contested. As a result, collective action became possible.
That system is now breaking down, not because workers have grown undisciplined but because AI has undermined its underlying logic. Consider, for example, a management consultant who oversees three AI agents for two hours. The agents then work autonomously for 20 hours, producing a $50,000 report. Is the consultant paid for two hours, for 20 or a fixed percentage of the value created? The time-based framework offers no coherent answer, yet wage structures and labor laws continue to impose clock discipline on work that is no longer defined by hours spent.
