The Time We Sell: Rethinking Work in the Age of AI
There’s a scene in In Time, a 2011 sci-fi film, where citizens trade time instead of money. Live longer if you accumulate more time; die if you run out. It’s a dystopian concept, but one that feels eerily relevant today. Personally, I think the film’s premise isn’t just a clever plot device—it’s a mirror held up to our modern working lives. And when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese recently described workers as having “nothing to sell but their time,” he inadvertently tapped into this unsettling reality.
What makes this particularly fascinating is how the phrase both captures and distorts our relationship with work. On the surface, it’s a straightforward acknowledgment: we trade our hours for wages. But if you take a step back and think about it, the idea of “selling time” is deeply unsettling. It implies that our lives are commodified, sliced into chunks and bartered away. This raises a deeper question: are we truly selling our time, or have we sold something far more intangible—our autonomy, our boundaries, our very lives?
One thing that immediately stands out is how this narrative clashes with the gig economy. Gig workers, for instance, often have little control over the price of their time. It’s dictated by demand, algorithms, and the whims of the market. But what many people don’t realize is that this lack of control isn’t unique to gig workers. With the rise of remote work and always-on culture, most of us are now selling our time in ways we barely recognize. Emails at midnight, weekend Zoom calls, and the blurring of work-life boundaries mean we’re giving away more hours than ever—often for less pay, thanks to declining real wages.
From my perspective, this isn’t just about economics; it’s about power. If we don’t even know the value of our time, are we truly selling it? Or are we simply selling our willingness to be available, to do whatever is demanded of us, regardless of the cost? Labor’s “right to disconnect” laws are a step in the right direction, but they barely scratch the surface of this issue.
A detail that I find especially interesting is how this dynamic exacerbates gender inequality. Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin argues that jobs rewarding availability disproportionately penalize women. In households with children, one partner—usually the woman—often steps back from their career to accommodate the other’s long hours. What this really suggests is that the modern workplace isn’t just undervaluing time; it’s reinforcing outdated gender roles.
This brings us to the broader question of work-life balance. Australians work longer hours than they did 40 years ago, and we fare poorly in international comparisons. Historian Sean Scalmer argues that the fight for shorter working hours has been central to Australia’s history, but it’s been sidelined in recent decades. Instead, we’ve focused on narrower issues like flexibility and parental leave. Important, yes, but not enough.
What’s intriguing is how unions are now linking shorter workweeks to the rise of artificial intelligence. AI has the potential to transform society, but will it lead to fewer hours and more leisure, or will it simply widen inequality? The book Abundance, reportedly a favorite in Cabinet, paints a utopian picture where AI reduces work hours because its profits are shared. But here’s the catch: translating that vision into reality would require a scale of redistribution that makes Bernie Sanders’ proposals look modest.
In my opinion, this is where the rubber meets the road for center-left governments like Albanese’s. They’ve shown a willingness to redistribute money, but are they ready to tackle the redistribution of time? As we hurtle toward an AI-dominated future, this question becomes increasingly urgent. Will we reclaim our time, or will we remain trapped in a dystopian cycle of endless work?
If you ask me, the answer lies in reimagining work itself. Shorter hours shouldn’t be an afterthought; they should be part of a broader vision for a transformed society. Historically, such changes have succeeded when tied to social movements—not isolated policy debates. As Albanese prepares to speak on AI next week, I’ll be watching to see if he dares to dream that big.
Because here’s the thing: time isn’t just a commodity. It’s the raw material of our lives. And if we’re going to sell it, we should at least know what we’re getting in return.
