AI took over my life for a year. Here’s what happened

Below, Joanna Stern shares five key insights from her new book, I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything. Joanna is an Emmy-winning tech journalist. She is the founder of New Things and NBC News’ chief tech analyst. She spent 12 years at The Wall Street Journal, has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and was a technology editor at ABC News and The Verge. To write this book, she spent a year letting AI and robots take over nearly every part of her life—or at least as much as she could without losing her mind, marriage, or job. She used it at work. She used it for her health. She used it for parenting. She used it for (almost) everything. What’s the big idea? AI should be used as a tool to support human thinking and creativity, not replace them. As AI becomes more integrated into our lives, we must actively preserve the experiences, relationships, judgment, and critical thinking skills that make us human. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Joanna herself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book. 1. Work with AI, not for it. The moment you outsource all the hard work—the work that actually makes you think—the AI isn’t working for you, you’re working for it. I saw this firsthand when I went back to my college to observe classes and saw how many students were using AI to summarize readings and write papers. Some told me they didn’t think they were thinking anymore, and they felt the results of it. Use AI to move faster, spark ideas, and automate the boring parts. But keep your weird, wonderful human judgment in the loop. Your job will likely require you to work alongside AI. Find the rhythm with your new machine coworker. But the moment you let it do most of the thinking for you, the atrophy begins, and you lose control. Step away from the bot. Do the hard work—sketch the outline, wrestle with the idea—maybe even using paper and a pen, like some prehistoric creature. As the great coach Jimmy Dugan (played by Tom Hanks) in A Le