Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This interview was filmed at the Wall Street Journal's Future of Everything event in New York. You can watch the interview on Spotify. Artificial intelligence is seemingly everywhere. In our workplaces, our schools, our homes, our doctor's offices, and even for some of us, our love lives.
Joanna Stern is an Emmy Award-winning tech journalist, and throughout 2025, she decided to let AI and robots take over every aspect of her life as research for her new book, which is called I Am Not a Robot. It comes out later this month. Today, we're going to sit down and talk about whether AI is living up to its promises and the impact it's having on our human lives.
And given that this is a live taping of the journal podcast, please cue the theme. Live from the Wall Street Journal's Future of Everything in New York, welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. Coming up on the show, Joanna Stern on her year of AI. So the title of your book is I Am Not a Robot. And I'm not just gonna take your word for it.
To prove that you are not a robot, I need you to look at all these images and tell me which ones include bicycles.
All of them, and a bridge.
Okay, good.
And a traffic light.
So you let AI and robots take over your life for a year. Why did you decide to do this project?
Insanity. So the only answer, you have to be a really insane person to do this.
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Chapter 2: What inspired Joanna Stern to let AI take over her life for a year?
Let's bring it faster. Right.
Let me tell everyone what the future looks like. And that's really actually the answer to the question, is that we are living in this time where every AI or tech executive is telling us that AI is going to change the world. It is going to change education. It is going to change healthcare. It is going to change business and work and all these parts of our lives.
And I just sort of thought, what does that mean when they say that? So I wanted to understand in the real fabric of our real lives, How is AI, one, already making a difference? And what does the future look like? And I know we're going to get to this, but I didn't define AI just as generative AI.
I think most people here in this audience and most listeners to this podcast are using some form of generative AI at this point.
Generative, I mean like the chatbots. Exactly.
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Chapter 3: How does AI currently impact our daily lives?
Yeah.
And I wanted to go a step further because we are hearing a lot about humanoid robots. We are seeing self-driving cars enter our streets, city by city, truly every week Waymo is announcing a new city. And these are all forms of AI. These are machines that make decisions, that can see the world, hear the world, and make decisions for us, just as some of those chatbots.
So I wanted to really expand that definition Personally, I didn't expand the definition. The definition of AI is actually that, but right now I think we just hear AI, AI, AI. We think chatbot.
So you've covered technology for almost 20 years. How does this new technology compare to past new transformative technologies?
I mean, that was another reason I wanted to write this book and why I wanted to take this on is I do believe that right now we are at this next transformational technological shift. We lived it, I lived it, you lived it through the smartphone. We lived it even before that through the beginning of the internet.
And I say in the introduction of the book, imagine in 1995, somebody taps you on the shoulder and says, actually in a few years, you are going to shop, you're gonna buy your pants on something called the internet.
You're going to buy your pants on your phone.
You're going to buy pants on a phone. And they're going to be like, what are you talking about, right? You're going to get maps that way. You're going to only communicate through this, through text and a thing called emojis. Like, this whole idea would have been crazy.
And I wanted to know, is this that moment for AI, where we look back at this moment and we say, actually, machines are going to do everything. They're going to drive you around. They're going to do your dishes in your house. They are going to be your assistant at work. In fact, you're not even going to have coworkers, because they're just going to be working with all these AI agents.
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