Joanna Stern: I Am Not a Robot — A Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything
Wall Street Journal tech columnist Joanna Stern reports on her year-long experiment delegating nearly every task to AI tools, in conversation with Matt Murray.
Why we picked this
Stern ran her experiment as a journalist, not an evangelist — the book is useful precisely because she was paying attention to what broke and felt wrong, not just what worked.
Joanna Stern spent a year attempting to use AI tools for as much of her professional and personal life as possible — writing, scheduling, research, decisions, communication — and documented what happened. As the Wall Street Journal’s technology columnist, she came to the experiment with a journalist’s skepticism and a practitioner’s willingness to actually use the tools, which means the book is populated with specific failures and surprises as much as capabilities.
The result is a field report from a moment when the technology is changing faster than most people’s understanding of it. “I Am Not a Robot” is less interested in the long-term philosophical questions about AI consciousness than in the immediate, practical question of what these tools actually do and don’t do when you rely on them for real tasks over real time. That granularity is what makes it a useful addition to a conversation that tends toward the abstract.
Matt Murray, a journalist and editor with his own long experience covering technology and business, is a conversation partner likely to push on the implications rather than the anecdotes. Free, afternoon event at Politics and Prose’s Connecticut Avenue location.