Should You Automate Your Life?
“I, Joanna Stern, do solemnly swear to live with the machines for the next 365 days.” Thus begins the year-long experiment chronicled in Stern’s book, “I Am Not a Robot,” a romp through the landscape of applied artificial intelligence, published this month. Early in 2025, Stern, a former technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal, decided to “cram artificial intelligence into as many corners” of her life as possible. In the course of a year, she used more than a hundred A.I.-based products, including glasses, bracelets, cars, robots, and a toothbrush. She talked with an A.I. therapist; replaced her research assistant with an A.I. agent; opened her marriage to an A.I. boyfriend; and let an A.I. draft bedtime stories for her kids. The project was, she writes, “an honest attempt to see what happens when AI and intelligent machines become part of everything.” Smartphones have done it; A.I. is next.
Stern is exactly the sort of writer you want to read on the question of how useful A.I. can be in real life. She’s made a career out of being a normal person who knows a lot about technology but never gets carried away by sci-fi fantasies. Instead, she prioritizes everyday reality. On YouTube, it’s easy to find videos in which recent college grads explain how they’ve automated their whole lives with A.I.; in a sense, this is easy for them, since their routines and careers haven’t been built yet. Stern is forty-one, with a wife and two kids, and she’s fully immersed in a career at which she’s extraordinarily competent. Like many people in midlife, she already knows how to do what she needs to do. You, similarly, may consider your prodigious skills, honed through untold hours of real-world training, and wonder how an A.I. could possibly aid you. If you can already read, write, and thrive, at home and at work—and if you don’t need to code, make a website, or create generative art—then “living with the machines” can seem more like a burden than a boon.
Predictably, Stern finds that adopting A.I. aggressively can be a form of self-sabotage. Her wife texts, asking her to help make lunch for the kids; “Sorry, I have other plans,” Stern’s A.I. responds. (“WTF,” her wife replies.) When Stern asks a chatbot for advice about a haircut, it recommends a fashionable bob while also providing a preview image in which her features have been subtly altered to make the haircut appear more flattering. (Her hairdresser tells her the cut wouldn’t work: “Always listen to the woman holding the scissors,” Stern concludes.)
Even when A.I. tools function well, they can come at a cost—a cost that is calculable for Stern only because she has previously done the tasks herself. When an agent orders her son’s school supplies automatically, Stern realizes that she misses the annual ritual of choosing pens and folders. After she dispatches an avatar of herself, trained by the company Otter.ai to mimic her vocal and intellectual style, to interview sources over Zoom, she is “blown away” by its ability to ask genuinely perceptive questions—and yet she’s experienced enough to see the risks inherent in sitting out the most enjoyable and inspiring part of her job. It’s during such interviews that connections are made and “ideas are born.”
“I Am Not a Robot” looks, superficially, like an attempt to assess the value of A.I.—a doomed endeavor, since the technology is always improving. (“One of the biggest obstacles I faced was that the tech kept getting better faster than I could test or write,” she notes.) On a deeper level, though, the book is a performance in which Stern models the process of deciding whether different kinds of A.I. are good for her, as an individual. She notes that she wrote all of “I Am Not a Robot” herself (the words “started in my brain and traveled, via my MacBook keyboard, onto the page”), yet she also employed “BookBots”: custom A.I. agents she built using ChatGPT and Claude. These bots, she explains, had access to her outlines and transcripts, and throughout the writing process they “researched, summarized papers, crunched data, copyedited sections, suggested better words, brainstormed, and even mocked-up illustration ideas.” (When the book was finished, they wrote the blurbs: “ ‘I Am Not a Robot’ is unusually self-aware,” ChatGPT observed.) Stern questions whether using the BookBots was a good idea. Did having them “constantly edit and tighten my writing cost me the version of this book that might have resulted from the slower, more reflective process of figuring out what I actually wanted to say?” She doesn’t really arrive at an answer, perhaps because whatever insight she found wouldn’t necessarily apply to anyone else. A.I. is everywhere, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all technology. It’s something you have to try for yourself, on your own problems, drawing your own conclusions.
Talking to college students over the past few months, I’ve been struck by the terrible bind they’re in when it comes to A.I. On the one hand, it seems obvious that they need to learn how to use the technology, to keep up with the competition and to prepare for the future. On the other, by employing A.I., they may end up cheating both their professors and themselves. Commentators outside the classroom seem to hold extreme views (A.I. is the future; A.I. is wrong), but they aren’t about to enter the job market for the first time. “Should we use it, or not?” some students asked me, recently. I basically said no—but maybe yes, carefully, a little?
Many people are living through versions of this dilemma in their own contexts. At work, it certainly seems wise to acquaint yourself with the tools that are changing your job and your field. But can you do so without losing your skills, and without being accused of faking, cheating, or shirking? In our personal lives, many of us are dependent on smartphones and social media, which we’ve spent decades decrying as oppressive and manipulative. But if we explore A.I.-based alternatives (by using the technology to summarize our e-mails, say) are we engaging in behavior that is in some way antihuman? Some argue for a total rejection of A.I. at work, in art, at school, and at home, while others rush to employ it everywhere. But the views expressed on both sides might not apply to you, in particular, because each of us has different goals, contexts, and competencies.
Stern’s book underscores the insufficiencies of “A.I.” as an umbrella term. When she goes for a mammogram, her doctor shows her how A.I.-based diagnostic tools have already improved her radiology practice: the software, she explains, has meaningfully increased accuracy, helped prioritize the most complex cases, and even boosted morale, by showing overworked radiologists how often they’re correct. And yet, at various dentists’ offices, Stern finds dentists who are “using AI to upsell the crap out of us” by employing tools that claim to identify incipient cavities worthy of early intervention. (“Something like this I wouldn’t even treat,” a more conscientious dentist says of an issue flagged by an A.I. “It’s not worth putting a hole in your tooth to fill just to get a cavity of that size.”) “Technology that reassures in oncology can feel manipulative in dentistry,” Stern writes, because those fields are fundamentally different. Dentistry is rife with judgment calls based on preferences, while oncology isn’t.
So much depends on where A.I. tools are used, and in what spirit. This means that, in many cases, whether A.I. is “good” or “bad” depends on you. Stern spends most of the year wearing Amazon’s Bee bracelet, a little wrist-based gizmo that transcribes everything it hears and then lets you ask questions about the transcripts. The technology is creepy: Stern has to remember to turn the bracelet off before she has sensitive conversations, and her friends and colleagues sometimes ask her to do so. She finds unappealing moments in the transcripts, “like the time I snapped at one of the kids,” and notes the problems with becoming “a walking data-collection experiment.” And yet it’s useful to be able to look back on exactly what the plumber said when he identified the source of the leak. The bracelet’s software summarizes what happens, serving as a kind of diary, and Stern ends the book with an entry about a November day when she worked on her book, packed lunches, and found her son’s lost whistle. Is the Bee bracelet a good idea? Maybe the answer has to do with how reliable your memory is. What about Meta’s A.I.-enabled smart glasses, which have raised questions about privacy and surveillance? In a recent thread on Bluesky, the writer Sarah Rose, who is legally blind, described them as “absolute game changers for the blind community.” It is “incredible,” she wrote, “to talk to your glasses and ask them what they see.”
As a journalist who covers artificial intelligence, I’ve been fascinated by the ups and downs in our collective response to it. For a while, people said it wasn’t that smart. Then they said it was so smart it would take over the world. Then they said it was a bubble—which it might be—that would soon burst, as the dot-com bubble did. At various times, when new versions of Claude or ChatGPT felt disappointing, observers argued that A.I. had hit a wall; at other times, other observers said it had made great strides. Earlier this year, when Anthropic and the Department of Defense fought over the development of military A.I., the scariest, most “Terminator”-esque predictions seemed salient again. Meanwhile, month by month, the technology continued to improve, and those who used it continued to get better at doing so. Many of the earliest, broadest claims about the stupidity of A.I. now seem hard to sustain.
Where are we now? Journalists and technologists have been rushing to respond to “Magnifica Humanitas,” the Pope’s encyclical about artificial intelligence, which appeared this week. Perhaps because I wasn’t expecting the Pope to break new ground on questions of A.I. safety, my main reaction was simply to step back and take in the big picture. The Pope had written about artificial intelligence, a field that, just a couple of decades ago, was widely regarded as moribund. (Many researchers then preferred to say that they worked on “machine learning” or “computer vision.”) The details of the encyclical were interesting, but on some level they didn’t matter: “The Pope is basically telling us that AI is here to stay,” the economist Tyler Cowen wrote.
That doesn’t mean that it’s time to start “living with the machines” and automating every aspect of your life. But it might indicate that it’s time to begin the more specific work of figuring out, in a conscious and considered way, where artificial intelligence might help and hurt you, in all your particularity. If those students were to ask me their question again, I’d answer differently. I’d say, use it, definitely—but use it seriously. Be open about it. And keep track, in different contexts, of what you’re gaining and giving up. Make a list. Take notes. ♦