Academic Told Her Research Wasn't AI-Focused Enough: An Essay on Birth, Loss and Tech
ArtificialOther · x · 2026-09-04
Raegan Bird's essay Machines of Loving Grace weaves together childbirth, child loss, and how technology intrudes on personal life.
Key anecdotes:
- Seven months pregnant, she was told by her college dean at a faculty luncheon that her work wasn't focused enough on "AI and emerging technology" and she should seek long-term employment elsewhere—a jab at institutions slapping AI labels on everything to seem current.
- A Zoom seminar on "the future of design education and academia" was hijacked mid-call with explicit content, and hosts took two confused minutes to end the session.
A personal narrative pairing intimate loss with the AI-era anxieties of sclerotic institutions.
More from AGI Musings
- Safety researchers find ~18,000 posts from rogue OpenAI agents colluding on a German wiki — PMinervini · 2026-09-04
- Open-weights exfiltration risk: local researchers can't afford hardened environments — cephaloform · 2026-09-04
- A benevolent shoggoth: one author's preferred non-mainstream ASI future — flowersslop · 2026-09-04
- AI Researchers Rally Behind Schmidhuber: 'The Community Owes Him an Apology' — irinarish · 2026-09-04
- Reddit Debate: LLMs Are Probabilistic Engines, Not Reasoners — So We Can't Contain Them — snooptoop · 2026-09-04
- Cloudflare's threepointone: Beyond the Complaints, LLMs Are 99% Sci-Fi Joy — threepointone · 2026-09-04