The sad wives of AI
Things I'm thinking about 5/14/26
Sorry for being MIA over the past several weeks. I missed you guys! I’ve been pretty busy and kind of really depressed, but my life is back to normal now. The (relatively) warm weather made a huge difference, and it’s amazing how seeing leaves on the trees really does turn everything around. I’m trying to ease my way back into Substack by writing these news roundups, because I think in the process of compiling them I learn something about the world and maybe I get to say something about it too. This week was a big news week! (Every week is a big news week.)
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A community run club in Los Angeles is watching ICE. There’s a lot to be pessimistic about right now, but I find that people find endless ways to protect and care for each other. “I already run, and this is my neighborhood. I can get up a little extra early one day a week, run, and be a witness.”
Thanks to months of resistance by indigenous groups, Alligator Alcatraz may be closing soon. The New York Times reported a couple of days ago that the detention center’s vendors were reportedly told it would close operations in June. It feels like a miracle in 2026 to read that acts of resistance can still work!
300,749 American workers got laid off during the first four months of the year. That’s more than 50% less than this time last year, during DOGE’s massive federal worker layoffs. But if you work in tech that’s not much of a consolation prize. Many of the tech workers I know personally are trying to pivot to business school.
The average age of an American CEO is 61. The median age of the labor force in 2024 according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is 41.7. This tells me that millennials are not at a point in their careers where they are beginning to step into leadership the way you might have expected them to, and Gen X is more marginal in corporate America than they should be by now. Compare this to the image Silicon Valley projects of itself, as a place where increasingly younger startup founders with stars in their eyes get wildly rich disrupting all kinds of industries. Well, Tim Cook is 65. Satya Nadella is 58. Ted Sarandos is 61. Even Mark Zuckerberg has finally reached middle age, at 41.
Women whose husbands work in AI are not happy. Some of these “sad wives of AI” have to deal with the brunt of childcare and housework. Some of them have lost out on their own AI-related career opportunities as a result. Some of these women are rich, and miserable. Some of them are considerably less well off, and even more miserable. Most of them will find that their husbands will not succeed in the AI gold rush, and will have to carry the impact of their disappointments the way women have for men throughout all of human history. I wonder how the writer’s marriage is going now.
In somewhat unrelated news, it’s Hot Divorcee Summer in the UK. “It’s like A Room of One’s Own, except there’s a hot guy in it.”
Congressional candidate Jack Schlossberg, best known for being a Kennedy and not much else, is “cool” among a certain Manhattan set. Schlossberg’s slogan is “Believe in Something Again” but the article does not mention what that “something” is, except for a sole paragraph on Israel-Palestine, where the writer notes that Schlossberg’s lack of position got him “Collegiate-Yale-Harvard alum support among the prepsters and his mother Caroline Kennedy’s Three Guys crowd”. This doesn’t seem to be a problem for his supporters, who gravitated towards his campaign mostly because he is good looking…? (Why would you admit this to a reporter???)
His campaign, however, doesn’t seem to be going so well.
NYC public school parents are increasingly angry about AI use in the classroom. What stands out to me is how children are being used as training data, and parents have very limited ability to consent to data collection. The article gives two examples of AI in the classroom, one that parents have the ability to opt out of (AI reading) and another that they can’t, or haven’t (AI math). The AI reading app they cite collects biometric data, so parents have the ability to opt out. But the AI math program also collects data on user habits for training purposes. These are different degrees of privacy invasion, to be sure, but is there really enough of a substantive difference here that parents shouldn’t still have informed consent? Do public school parents in New York City or elsewhere receive any kind of guidance on what rights to digital privacy their children have? This seems like a big problem!
A candidate for insurance commissioner in California wants to single-payer for disaster insurance. It would be really cool if this caught on with state governments, although a lot of states hit hardest by natural disasters (see: Florida during hurricane season) are red states and they never would.