The Journalist Who Let AI Run Her Life For a Year

**Joanna Stern** (0:00)
People are doing this across the country. They are wearing cameras, recording what they're doing. This can be folding the laundry, cleaning a house, cooking. Those are just domestic chores. Then there are people that are doing this in industrial settings, or they're plumbers, or they're mechanics, and they're doing this all, recording it all to go train the robots, to be able to do these things. It's totally crazy. It's really dystopian in many ways.

**Jon Favreau** (0:26)
So dystopian, I was just gonna say, yeah.

**Joanna Stern** (0:27)
And I had a lot of fun with it, but I was also very saddened by, I had this company come to Friends of My Department in New York, and to cleaning people show up, and to women, and they're wearing these hats, right? They're filming themselves. And all I can think of is, they're training their replacements.

**Jon Favreau** (0:53)
I'm Jon Favreau, and you just heard from today's guest, Emmy Award-winning tech journalist, Joanna Stern. Joanna just spent an entire year doing the least offline thing imaginable. She used AI to do everything, answer her texts, mow her lawn, analyze her mammograms. She even credits AI with giving her the courage to finally leave her job at the Wall Street Journal and start her own media company, New Things, which she launched earlier this year. She writes about her year of AI binging in her new book, I Am Not a Robot, which is a fascinating look into what AI technology is and isn't capable of, and how it has the potential to reshape our lives.
So I invited Joanna to talk about it. We got into how much we should trust AI versus the human beings who built it, how she approaches AI in her life now, and so much more. It was a great conversation. It's a great book. Here's Joanna Stern.
Joanna, welcome to Offline.

**Joanna Stern** (1:48)
Thank you for having me here.

**Jon Favreau** (1:50)
So you for an entire year deliberately tried to put artificial intelligence into every corner of your life, your health care, your kid's bedtime stories, your car, your therapy, your job, your romantic life. Why do that to yourself?

**Joanna Stern** (2:06)
As I say, insanity can drive you to do a lot of things. So that's where I landed with what happens when I went insane. But as a journalist and someone who has tested technology for a long time, so just a little back story, I've been a tech journalist for nearly two decades now. And what I always like to do is test the products. I've always been a reviewer, columnist, telling people what I think of products. And so around 2024, right? Chachi PT had been around, but we were just getting inundated with products and hype from every tech company, every tech CEO, every entrepreneur that this AI was going to change tech and the world in ways we never ever saw before with any other tech revolution. And it's going to change so many parts of life, right? It's going to change transportation, it's going to change the home, education, healthcare, politics, society, everything. And so I sort of said, okay, well, you're saying this.
I'm going to go and test it, I want to try and test it. I want to know what this future that you're telling me looks like. And so the best way I knew how to do that, given my experience, was to try to live with all of this tech for a year.
I mean, I didn't know it was going to be a year, but I sort of thought, okay, a year is a good amount of time. On the flip side, everything kind of expires within a few days of AI being on the market right now. So I think the book continues to be very current, but of course, a year after now, doing that, things have progressed even more. But so that was the real reason. I wanted answers. I wanted answers to what all these tech entrepreneurs said was coming in the future.

**Jon Favreau** (3:41)
So one of your three rules was what you call benchmark the baseline, which means to always ask whether the machine is better than the human version it's replacing. Where was the human version most decisively better?

**Joanna Stern** (3:58)
There's a lot of places. I think that the human version was decisively better. And maybe that's some of my bias, which I kind of talked about in the book. But I mean, one of the first one that comes to mind was my human therapist. And that was one where I very clearly put my AI therapist in the same room as my human therapist and brought my AI therapist to a session. I gave the human therapist a little bit of a heads up, but not totally. She didn't know what she was going to be hearing.