My year with robots: How Joanna Stern let AI into her home, her work – and her heart

FAfter a year, Joanna Stern decided to transform herself into a “lab rat” – the object of her own experiment. Over the course of 2025, she invited artificial intelligence into “every corner” of her life. She let the AI ​​answer her text messages, decide what she ate and cooked, mow her lawn, fold her laundry, drive her places, analyze her mammograms and even, in the darkness of a burner phone, be her lover. The resulting book, “I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything,” asks all the big questions, including: What happens when AI can do everything humans can? And what comes next?

If anyone can provide answers, it’s definitely Stern. Last February, she ended her 12-year stint as the Wall Street Journal’s personal technology columnist. During her tenure, she won an Emmy for her short documentary E-Ternal: A Tech Quest to “Live” Forever, which explored digital legacies and earned a reputation for product reviews that were incredibly creative and fiendishly rigorous. You once…