Meet the Sad Wives of AI

Alessandra Ram is currently wrangling two babies in her household: a 10-month-old daughter and an LLM. For Wired, Ram writes a dispiriting yet sharp and funny piece about being to be married to someone who is the head of AI at a company. Spoiler: not so fun. Ram speaks with other “sad wives” like herself—women in relationships with “AI-pilled spouses” who are desperately trying to capitalize on this moment in tech—and also hears from family therapists and a labor researcher about why this domestic imbalance is “predictably gendered.”

The story is older than Silicon Valley, of course. Every major technological boom has produced the same figure, the person who gives everything to the wave. During the industrial revolution, it was the factory worker. During the Gold Rush, it was the men who left their families and headed west. During the dotcom boom, it was the founders sleeping under their desks in SoMa. Now, it is the person who is building, building, always building—vibe coding at midnight, constantly upgrading their models—convinced that stopping for five minutes means missing everything. Economists call this the “ideal worker.” Rodgers calls it a trap. “Someone who works many hours, giving all of themselves to this new force,” she says. “That means less time at home for the partner, less time for care work.”