DUBAI – New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s pledge to raise the minimum hourly wage to $30 captures a dilemma that is haunting most advanced economies. Even as wage floors rise, workers feel less secure. Yet by responding with blunt tools like the minimum wage, policymakers are overlooking the deeper problem: the decoupling of human labor time from economic value. For two centuries, labor markets were anchored in that relationship. Wages, contracts, and social protections all assumed that time was a reliable proxy for output. But AI has severed this link. Medical diagnosticians who spent years mastering pattern recognition now compete with systems that process cases in seconds. Lawyers with AI agents can complete tasks in minutes that would take hours otherwise. The question is no longer whether minimum wages risk overshooting, but whether time-based compensation remains meaningful at all. What is to be done? For starters, fiscal frameworks must recognize machine time as a distinct production input and price it accordingly. This is not to suggest a “robot tax,” but rathe