Joanna Stern

Joanna Stern (born 1983) spent twelve years as The Wall Street Journal’s senior personal-tech columnist, winning an Emmy for her video work and a reputation as the reviewer who tests gadgets by living inside them — before leaving to found her own tech media company, New Things.

The year of the robot

Her defining AI experiment ran through 2025: a year using AI to do almost everything, chronicled in I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything (2026), an instant New York Times bestseller. She gave AI her calendar, her research, her driving (via Waymo), her medical scans, her therapy, and — with her wife’s consent — took an AI boyfriend. She tested over a hundred AI health and medicine products alone.

The verdict was “very mixed, which is not how I expected this to go.” AI radiology genuinely impressed her — “they are able to see things that the human eye can’t” — while the companionship experiments produced her bluntest advice: don’t fall in love with a robot. Her deeper warning is cognitive: “When you start to use AI, you’re outsourcing so much of your brain.”

Stern still uses the tools daily — AI research briefings in the car remain part of her routine — and argues children must become fluent in working with computers smarter than they are, while staying skeptical of them. It is adoption with hands firmly on the wheel: the same stance fellow gadget-empiricists like Marques Brownlee have converged on.