Lessons From a Year of Letting AI Do Everything

Joanna Stern spent a year using AI to do (almost) everything: write her emails, analyze  her medical records, text her wife, drive her around, and even fold her laundry. The result is her new book, I Am Not a Robot, which documents what she learned testing AI as a journalist, a parent, and a newly independent founder.

Joanna spent over a decade as a tech reporter at The Wall Street Journal before leaving to launch her own media outlet, New Things. She brought the same approach that's defined her career — hands-on, consumer-first testing of the technology itself — to her year-long experiment in living with AI.What she found was more nuanced than the hype: some of it works, some of it really doesn't, and some of it needs guardrails.

In this episode, Jessi and Joanna discuss:

• Why the same AI technology that's transforming cancer detection is also upselling you at the dentist
• The data privacy moves everyone should make right now, including the settings most people never touch
• What happened when Joanna tried to let AI handle all her communications
• Why robots are bad at folding clothes
• How AI gave Joanna the confidence to leave a staff job and start a business
• The emotional difference between work you make yourself and work a machine makes for you
• What it means to raise kids in a world where the struggle of figuring things yourself might disappear entirely

Follow Jessi Hempel and Joanna Stern on LinkedIn.