Time Price in AI

New Economics (and Risks) for Software

In Salvador Dali’s famous painting, time drips like wax. It’s a fitting metaphor for what’s happening today in the world of software economics.

For centuries, we’ve lived by the maxim time is money. But what happens when software—once a scarce and labor-intensive resource—can be generated in minutes, seconds or milliseconds? When an app or design can be conjured by GenAI in the time it takes to sip from a cup of coffee?

Suddenly, time isn’t the constraint anymore. So if time is no longer money… is money now time?

Economist George Gilder thinks so.

The Time Price Revolution

In his book Life After Capitalism, Gilder introduces a radical rethinking of value: time becomes the true unit of economic measurement, not dollars. His argument is simple but profound: money is a fiction. It inflates. It fluctuates. But time? Time is scarce, incorruptible, and universal. It is a constant.

And that makes it the ultimate unit of value.

What Is a Time Price?

Instead of asking how much does something cost, Time Price helps us understand: how long do we have to work to get it? But what if the thing we’re trying to get is software, and software can be delivered through AI with astounding speed? We’ve posted in the past about AI Time, and how “AI First” companies are outpacing their competitors. We even made the argument a few years back that competing in real time is no longer limited to synchronizing activities with the passage of time, but delivering an outcome at a point in time.

We are not talking about fast-interval processes, like high-frequency stock trading, but rather no-interval processes like real-time ai. When an event occurs, a function is triggered in real-time. Time in the past drove synchronized events. Events in the future deliver synchronized outcomes.

While the Time Price of software may be approaching zero, new challenges are being introduced. If software is free through AI, is it risk-free to the Business? With new economics, comes new risks which need to be examined.

From Cloud to Code

Just as cloud computing made computing resources radically accessible (and sometimes free), GenAI is doing the same for software.

What used to take days of coding now takes hours of prompting. But with great speed comes tangible risk: Are we building the next generation of innovation—or the next software maintenance crisis? At Strategic Machines, this is an issue we have been thinking about deeply as we build AI Agents for clients. AI components deliver astonishing value, leveraging Language Models for workflow, analysis, insights and response. However, we have shifted responsibilities to the Models in unexpected ways. We've been thinking about the the unreadable rules of AI and their implications for our clients.

The Bottom Line

So, we agree with Gilder. Time is a constant, although risk is not. While Time Price is a useful way to think about the changing state of software economics, and even software pricing and delivery, the changing state of how software is being built introduces real-time risks that deserve a fresh look. But more on that in the next post.

So again—apologies to Dali. Time may be melting. But risks are compounding.

And it’s time to think about those unreadable rules.