In an era defined by AI, can work still be measured by the clock?

Hwaseong, South Korea, past midnight. An engineer watches a defect pattern surface on her screen – the kind that, caught now, saves a week of wafers. She is locked in, fully absorbed, the way engineers get when a breakthrough is close. But she has to go home. The law says so.Yet something is disrupting the clock she races against. Artificial Intelligence is quietly rewriting what her hours are worth.On June 29, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung stood alongside the leaders of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix to unveil an 800 trillion won (US$548 billion) semiconductor initiative, part of industrial plans expected to be the largest in the nation’s history. Within days, the debate shifted from capital to constraints. South Korea’s leading newspapers converged on a remarkably consistent message: before investing another won, fix the laws that limit workers to a 52-hour week.