Harper
I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything by Joanna Stern
Published in May 2026
Joanna Stern is my favorite personal tech reporter. Up until February, Stern wrote the personal technology column for The Wall Street Journal. She left that high-profile job to start her own media venture, New Things, just as her book I Am Not a Robot was being published.
Tech and ed tech need more Joanna Sterns. By that, I mean we need more people thinking and writing (and, yes, making YouTube videos) about tech (and ed tech) that are some combination of smart, skeptical and funny.
The premise of I Am Not a Robot is that Stern spends a full year putting AI tools, technologies and services at the center of her life. Going on the Gibson theory that “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” (which, interestingly, is not a quote from any of Gibson’s novels), Stern’s idea is that the best way to understand where AI is taking all of us in the future is to binge on AI today.
Crucially for the enjoyment factor of I Am Not a Robot, Stern spends more time with embodied AI than with generative AI. The book is most fun when Stern describes her family’s misadventures with humanoid robots that fall down, shirt-folding robots that are super slow, cooking robots that oversalt each meal, robot massages that are pretty great, and self-driving (Waymo) rides that don’t quite go as planned.
What sets I Am Not a Robot apart from other tech and society books and Stern apart from other tech writers, is Stern’s willingness to write from a deeply personal (and often vulnerable) place. The best chapter in the book is about AI and health care, where Stern talks about her experience with AI-assisted breast cancer screening (excellent) and AI-enabled dental diagnostics (not so great).
There are also fun chapters (some of which take place on the campus where I work, which happens to be the birthplace of AI—hence Stern’s visits) on the temptations and dangers of turning your AI into your significant other.
For those of us reading with higher ed eyes, Stern includes a section on returning to Union College (where she graduated in 2006) to sit in on a class and talk to students about how they are using AI for assignments. (Terrifying, nothing new, depressing.)
As I was reading I Am Not a Robot, I kept turning to my wife, Julie (a retired pediatric oncologist), and saying, “You have to read this book!” Julie is deeply tired of hearing me talk about AI. She really doesn’t want to hear what Claude thinks about anything. And she is skeptical that my use of Claude for my job really counts as working. If you have an AI-disinterested partner, friend or colleague in your life, then you might consider investing in a gift copy of I Am Not a Robot. The book will not persuade anyone that AI is a force for good. Stern herself is deeply skeptical. What the book does well is keep the interest of those of us immersed in AI work and conversations (mostly because Stern is such an appealing person to spend time with), while explaining, in nonjargon terms, how the underlying technologies of AI function and the technology’s history and likely trajectory.
What are you reading?
