For a year, Joanna Stern decided to turn herself into a “lab rat” – the object of her own experiment. Throughout 2025, she invited artificial intelligence into “every corner” of her life. She let AI answer her texts, decide what she ate and cooked, mow her lawn, fold her washing, drive her places, parse her mammograms and even, in the darkness of a burner phone, be her lover. The resulting book, I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything, asks all the big questions, including: what happens when AI can do everything humans can do? And what comes after that?
If anyone can produce answers, surely it’s Stern. Last February, she ended a 12-year stint as a personal technology columnist at the Wall Street Journal. During her tenure, she won an Emmy for her short documentary E-Ternal: A Tech Quest to “Live” Forever, which explored digital legacies, and built a reputation for product reviews that were outlandishly creative and fiendishly stringent. She once took an Apple watch jetskiing on the Hudson river to evaluate its connectivity.
A video in which she sternly – she couldn’t have a more appropriate surname – upbraided two sheepish-looking Apple executives for Siri’s AI shortcomings, in the style of a parent scolding a child for homework violations, earned her the nickname “tech mommy”. It’s not like people call her that on the street, she says, but at home in New Jersey – where she lives with her wife, a marketing and brand consultant, and sons, aged eight and four – they do: “I am Mommy and my wife is Mama and [the children] definitely know me as the tech mommy.”
She has inscribed the nickname on a desk nameplate, although it’s not in sight today. Stern, 41, is speaking on a video call from her attic studio, all slate-blue paint and shelves optimally interspersed with plants and robots. “I want to embody that tech mommy spirit,” she says. “Do I have big fears with AI? Yes. I mean, there’s the environmental fear, there’s the job-loss fear. They all stack on each other – and is the benefit we get from AI worth all this?”
In practice, Stern’s year of “24/7 AI livin’” turned out to be more transformational than she expected. Since it came to an end in December, she has not only left the Wall Street Journal, but also launched a media business, New Things, (which promises “tech journalism for humans who like fun”), started a YouTube channel that now has nearly 80,000 subscribers, and, of course, written the book. Throughout, AI has been her collaborator.
I Am Not a Robot presents Stern as a frontline adventurer, bravely sending dispatches back to present-day Earth from a fact-finding voyage to the very near future. “It’s the reality already starting to arrive for all of us,” she writes. “I just happened to live it first.”
It sounds scary and lonely out there as the first human in a species-threatening…
Source link
Disclaimer
We strive to uphold the highest ethical standards in all of our reporting and coverage. We blogs.grocliq.com want to be transparent with our readers about any potential conflicts of interest that may arise in our work. It’s possible that some of the investors we feature may have connections to other businesses, including competitors or companies we write about. However, we want to assure our readers that this will not have any impact on the integrity or impartiality of our reporting. We are committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news and information to our audience, and we will continue to uphold our ethics and principles in all of our work. Thank you for your trust and support.
Website Upgradation is going on for any glitch kindly connect at [email protected]
