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.

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...