Joanna Stern in Conversation with Kara Swisher: I Am Not a Robot
WSJ tech columnist Joanna Stern discusses her year delegating nearly everything to AI, in conversation with veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher at 92NY.
Why we picked this
Stern ran her AI experiment as a working journalist with a skeptic's eye — this isn't a techno-optimist pitch but a first-person account of what actually happened, told by two of the most clear-eyed technology reporters in the country.
Joanna Stern spent a year attempting to hand off as much of her professional and personal life as possible to AI tools — writing, scheduling, research, decisions, communication — and documented the results in I Am Not a Robot. As the Wall Street Journal’s technology columnist, she approached the experiment with a journalist’s instincts: what broke, what felt wrong, and what surprised her matter as much as what worked. The result is one of the most grounded and useful accounts of AI in daily life published by anyone with the access and platform to actually test it at scale.
Kara Swisher, whose decades covering Silicon Valley have made her one of the industry’s most reliable critical observers, brings her own long view to the conversation: she has interviewed nearly every figure who shaped the current AI moment and has watched enough technology cycles to know the difference between a genuine shift and a gold rush. The pairing at 92NY promises a conversation that is less about hype and more about reckoning.
The event takes place at the 92nd Street Y, which has built one of the most consistent talk programs in New York around questions of technology, democracy, and culture. Tickets are $50 and required for entry.