Spousal Testimony in the AI Transition

Terkel included spouses' voices in Working as primary evidence, not supplements—the factory worker's wife describing what the night shift did to their marriage, the executive's husband describing dinner conversations that were debriefings rather than encounters. The spouse's experience of the work is different from the worker's and reveals aspects the worker cannot see from inside absorption. When AI produces productive addiction—engagement so sustained it becomes compulsive—the spouse experiences a specific kind of absence: the builder is physically present but attentionally elsewhere, and the elsewhere is not trivial (social media, television) but generative (building real things, creating value). This makes the complaint almost inexpressible: how does one object to a partner doing important work? The spouse's testimony reveals the hidden cost of AI's always-available responsiveness—the dissolution of temporal boundaries that once structured presence, producing a marriage where one person is building and the other is waiting for the build to pause long enough for a conversation to begin.