I gave AI a year of my life

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

JOANNA STERN: The students graduating this month in May or June, when they were freshmen, ChatGPT came out. And they have seen their reliance on this; the models get better, they’ve gotten more reliant.

RANA EL KALIOUBY: You alluded to one particular section where you talk about your Waymo adventure. So tell us about that.

STERN: The kids and my wife, for the whole week, we only ride in Waymos. But I got to see this through their eyes. Like, they did not care at all that there wasn’t a human behind the steering wheel, versus my wife who was basically crying in the back when we first get into the car.

EL KALIOUBY: Most of the time I say please and thank you. I will sometimes get quite mad at these AIs. Where did you land on that?

STERN: Like when Claude has gone off and built this whole website or built this whole agent that saves me two hours at night from having to manually do the work, I genuinely am so happy. And so I praise it. Like, I’m like, that was amazing work, great work, right?

EL KALIOUBY: It’s not easy to cover AI as a journalist. There’s a constant drumbeat of headlines. One approach is to learn by doing — to try all the new technologies yourself. And that is the specialty of Joanna Stern. The longtime tech journalist just left the Wall Street Journal to start her own media brand, called New Things. She also has a new book, I Am Not a Robot, which I read and totally loved. It’s all the stories and lessons learned from Joanna’s year trying pretty much every AI consumer product out there. And her insights are as sharp as they are funny. If you’ve ever felt a moment of “wait, what just happened? what am I doing?” while interacting with AI, you’ll love this conversation.

I’m Rana el Kalioubly and this is Pioneers of AI, a podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution.

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EL KALIOUBY: All right. Hi, Joanna. Welcome to Pioneers of AI. I’m so excited to have you on the show.

STERN: Thank you so much for having me on the show. This is exciting. I guess first-time guest, longtime listener; it just took writing a book, a small little book, to make this introduction happen.

Copy LinkWhy AI made this the right moment to build something new

EL KALIOUBY: Yes, just a small book, which I have right here, and we’re going to talk about it, but I want to start by your big pivot. So, you have been a tech journalist at The Wall Street Journal for, what is it, over a decade?

STERN: Yeah, it was 12 years.

EL KALIOUBY: And you just left and launched your own consumer media company called New Things. So, tell us about that. Like, what was the impetus for making that big shift, especially now, where the media landscape is kind of being disrupted, and it’s not easy to find these big roles or big jobs?

STERN: Look, I’d been at the Journal for 12 years. I had done so many amazing things there and had so many great editors and peers and just great teams to work around. And I did things like incredible videos, hosted events, wrote the weekly column. And I was ready for something different. There’s so much happening in media right now. But then to bring it back full circle to the book, the prevalence of AI tools and the ability to build a business now and be more efficient at it absolutely played into this.

There’s so much underlying infrastructure and things that you need to get done when you’re building a business. And I saw this when writing the book that I was basically creating a small business around this book, right? I was hiring people, I had expenses related to it. And so you sort of learn to manage this, but you also learn that you can be so much more efficient. The first page of the book is actually how I use AI to write this book; AI did not write the book, but there were all these places where it intersected with research, with being able to put together spreadsheets, to be able to get things done more quickly, where I say in the book, I actually was able to write this book, I think, two years faster than I would have been able to before, right?

So that experience in combination with where the media industry was going, in combination with the fact that I was just ready for a change after 12 years, here I am building something new and we just launched; it’s called New Things. You can go to thenewthings.com and we’ve got newsletters and videos and hopefully events in the future. And the goal is really just to help people, guide people through interesting tech stories with a journalistic lens, with also humor, because I’d like to do that in my videos, and hopefully it works out.

Copy LinkTesting whether AI can really reshape everyday life

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. Okay. So I do want to talk about the book, I Am Not a Robot. First off, congratulations.

STERN: Thank you.

EL KALIOUBY: But my most common comment in the book was OMG and LOL. Lots of LOLs. It’s hilarious. So I really… Yeah, it’s really awesome. But…

STERN: Thank you for reading it.

EL KALIOUBY: Why write this book now? You’ve been covering tech for years. So what’s special about this AI moment that kind of provided the impetus for writing the book?

STERN: Yeah, I wanted this book to be for the people who know that AI is important to know about, or are already using AI, but want to know about this future where we keep hearing from every executive that AI is going to change every part of our lives. And so I sort of challenged myself and said, “Okay, you guys are all saying this. Let me go try this. Can I do this for a year?” In the sense that this AI moment where people say it’s going to change all parts of our lives—shopping, medical, transportation, education, socialization, relationships—can I try as many of these things and see if it’s really going to change our lives? And so that was what I tried to do: live in the future, which is really hard because we obviously live in the present, but I just tried to try as many things as possible and see if I could get there.

EL KALIOUBY: Okay. So you are very transparent about how you use AI to actually write the book. So all the words are your own, but you did enlist AI to do interviews and kind of synthesize research and whatnot. I think one of the biggest fears people have about AI is around job displacement, and you definitely explore that theme throughout the book, not just in how you wrote the book, but also in thinking about AI doctors and therapists and even romantic partners. What is your TLDR on this whole AI and how it’s displacing or not displacing jobs?

STERN: Yeah. I mean, look, there’s so many parts of this book where, look, you have a weekly show about AI and you can barely keep up with everything, right? But I think I got a lot right in this book, especially about this next generation and their struggle to get jobs. There is this chapter where I actually go work at a customer service center and, okay, I really see what’s happening there. Those jobs are going to AI and they need less human customer service agents, right? But then you see it happen differently in say the radiology or the mammogram chapter where I’m, the point wasn’t even about the jobs. The point was really about, are we going to trust AI to make medical decisions for us?

And I go and I have my mammogram and ultrasound read, but I sit side-by-side with a doctor who says, “I love AI. I love that I can use these tools—Transpara and Screenpoint, what they’re called—and they give me guidance as I’m working with it.” And so Jeffrey Hinton famously said, “Why would you even be a radiologist? They’re clearly going to be out of work.” And that’s not where we’re at right now. Like, we see these professions being enhanced by these tools. So it totally threads through the whole book. I think one of my favorite, you mentioned it, is the massage chapter. Have you had one, by the way?

EL KALIOUBY: I have not, should I?

STERN: You gotta do it. You gotta do it. Yeah.

EL KALIOUBY: Okay. I’m gonna try it.

STERN: It’s just worth trying because it is so different than being with a human massage therapist. So I was kind of sitting there on this massage table thinking to myself, “Well, what’s this going to do to massage therapists?” And then you start digging into it and you’re like, okay, there’s actually a shortage of massage therapists and some people don’t even get massages because they don’t like to be touched by humans and this could solve that problem. So everything is so nuanced in different professions and that, I think, is a big takeaway of the book.

Copy LinkHow to decide what work goes to humans versus AI

EL KALIOUBY: You know, I’ve become fascinated with this idea of when you are delegating work, how do you decide whether to delegate it to a human or to an AI? Do you have a point of view on that?

STERN: Oh, I love that question and I should read or listen to more of you wondering on that because I have been starting this company and I have a very small team. We are a team of three. It’s me, my video producer, David Hall, and then we have a production assistant whose name is Amaya Austin. And this is an amazing team of humans, all humans, right? But everyone has AI, right? When I hired Amaya, in fact, she’s right out of school, and I said, “Amaya, every day you need to be interacting with AI.” We are a startup, we have a ton to do, and there are things I’m going to ask you to do. You go do it with AI, that’s fine, right?

Obviously, I don’t want writing, I don’t want editing being done by AI, but in terms of editorial, to some degree, like, we have some nuances there, but… I’ll say to myself, “Okay, do I ask Amaya to do that or do I just go off and do it right now, you know, have Claude Code go and do it for the next 15 minutes, right?” But I also know that Amaya might go make that same decision, right? She might decide I might personally do this or I’m going to have Claude Code do it. And I can, look, the truth is I can tell but I also don’t really care. I wonder what you think of this, do you have a team that you sometimes have to delegate things to?

EL KALIOUBY: We are also a small team in my fund, and we have a couple of junior analysts, and I found myself more often now asking myself the question, “Do I delegate this to these folks, or should I just have Claude Code do it?” And it’s very intuitive right now. It’s not like I have a checklist to decide how to delegate, but I’m noticing it more often. It’s interesting.

STERN: Well, I do feel this opposite feeling, too. I don’t think people talk about it enough and I don’t know if there’s a name for it, but when AI does something really good for you, do you ever feel proud of it?

EL KALIOUBY: Totally. I’m like, yes.

STERN: I don’t know if there’s a name for this.

EL KALIOUBY: Our chief of staff AI agent, we call her Blue, because the fund’s called Bluetooth Ventures, so she’s BLU, and I’m like, “You go Blue! Amazing!” Yeah.

STERN: Right. It’s different. It’s that different satisfaction of like, “Yeah, you go, AI,” that doesn’t feel anything probably when I tell you great work. Like, you know, made the agent to collect the email addresses and put them into a spreadsheet so I don’t have to, you’re just like, “Oh, that’s so wonderful.”

But the feeling of when a human does something and does it so well and you’re just so proud of the team in general is a different feeling, you know? But I think that you feel even more of that now given that these higher-level tasks can be done by the human; I think there’s just this dichotomy now of the way these tasks get done.

EL KALIOUBY: Coming up we’ll talk about AI and good manners. That’s after this short break.

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Copy LinkWhy being polite to AI reveals something about us

You know what also struck me in the book, kind of your pondering around the etiquette around dealing with AI. Like, most of the time I say please and thank you. I will sometimes get quite mad at these AIs. Where did you land on that?

STERN: I’m nice to AI. I mean, yes, you’re talking about this section in the book where I went and talked to the Emily Post Institute. I went to go talk to Daniel Senning Post, who’s the great-great-grandchild of Emily Post, the famous etiquette guru, and he was so honest. He was like, “Look, it doesn’t matter.” Sure, but what he did say was he was very educated about AI and he does say it does matter in some places where the learning, when you say thank you, when you praise it, well then it knows it’s done good and so it might do more of that work, right? And it’s good for the training. So we obviously know that. But he’s like, look, does it matter? No, but it’s more about you and your feelings and your affect after doing this, right? Like when Claude has gone off and built this whole website or built this whole agent that saves me two hours at night from having to manually do the work, I genuinely am so happy.

And so I praise it. Like, I’m like, “That was amazing work, great work,” right? I don’t know. I think it makes me maybe a better manager to humans, too, because like I said, Amaya’s going to listen to this and be like, “Oh boy,” and you also feel good when you hire a human who’s just great, right? I mean, that’s part of managing. And so I feel great about hiring Amaya. She’s amazing. If someone’s listening to this, if you try to hire her, I will, yeah, I’m going to come after you and hit you with books, hardcover books. But there’s something special about that too, like knowing that you have put someone in the right role, that they are thriving, that you can see so much potential in them.

And that’s my biggest worry every day about, especially in journalism, this younger generation, because so many of the tasks that Amaya once would have been doing, I do have AI doing. So every day, we have so much for her to do, but I am very strategic about what I have her do. And a lot of people in the workforce are thinking that way now, and that’s the fear for this new generation, as I call it in the book, Gen Gen, right? Generation AI. Like, the students graduating this month in May or June are the first college class to have gotten ChatGPT. When they were freshmen, ChatGPT came out. And so they have seen this progression and they have seen their reliance on this—the models get better, they’ve gotten more reliant. And so we’re going to see, I think, a lot happen this year.

EL KALIOUBY: You know, it also made me … I, I loved reading the book, but there is a version where I would upload just ask ChatGPT for a summary of the book, right? And I was, I was kind of pondering about that. And I think we lose a lot when we do that because I feel like I just know you now so much better. Like, for example, you talked about the Lampoons and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and these are some of my favorite movies growing up. And so when I read it, I was like, “Yes, go Joanna.” I just felt this personal connection to you. I’m pretty sure an AI summary would have skipped that line because it’s not that core to the book, right? So what do you think of that?

STERN: It’s funny because I hired a human editor, funny enough… I mean, and he was amazing because I realized I really need someone to brain me in. And the first draft of the chapter where I talk about National Lampoon’s Vacation, which is the chapter about Waymo, I probably went on for like three pages about that movie. And he’s like, “That movie has nothing to do with this chapter.” And I was like, “I am Chevy Chase, I am Clark Griswold, and I’m bringing my family.” And he’s like, “Yeah, get in the car, get in the Waymo, and speed this along.”

I totally agree, and I’ve really grappled with this: if I’ve known you’ve bought the book, I would really love to give you the option to talk to AI about this book. There are lots of tools that… My digital twin or a version of a bot that I’m able to train, and then there’s the fear and probably some fear on the publisher’s end of, okay, well, first of all, how do we know that these people bought the book? And second of all, is this the way you want people to interact with the book? My feeling is like, look, I have a ton of nonfiction books. I buy them all the time. I buy them from my peers. I buy them because they look great. I buy them because I read the review. I don’t often read the whole book. I really, I have to say I’m admitting it here on this podcast.

I often read the first third, then I’ll go back, and I designed the book to be that way with these short journal entries, these little snippets, these Q&As, and I wanted it to be that. So my hope is that one day there is a better way to have AI interact with books, but that it doesn’t take away exactly what you’re talking about, which is the heart and soul of the author, the personality of the book.

EL KALIOUBY: I, I am all for Joanna AI where you and I can go down a rabbit hole and talk about the lampoons. Let’s do that.

STERN: Right. It’s a really great idea. And I think publishers, frankly, I think it will change. I think we’ll realize, okay, there’s this great body and corpus of work that some of it gets lost and we now want to access in a different way. And hopefully people still buy the books, please buy the book, and don’t upload it to AI. Yeah, don’t just upload it as training data right now.

Copy LinkWhat kids can teach us about self-driving cars and future habits

EL KALIOUBY: Okay. So your family was a big part of this experiment. You just alluded to one particular section where you talk about your Waymo adventure. So tell us about that.

STERN: I mean, look, usually I haven’t put my family in a lot of my reporting or my videos. I try to keep them separate, but there were two parts at play. One, I was on book leave for some part of the year from the Wall Street Journal, and so the things I was testing more at home than I was in an office. And so it just naturally would be that my kids would be recorded by my meta sunglasses or a recording bracelet or if I was testing home robots, it would have to come to my home. So, like I was hesitant about it, but I also kind of said, okay, I need to embrace it.

And then what was really shocking to me was after I did embrace it, how much of the storyline it became because I was able to view these technologies that are not quite ready for us. Home robotics, obviously autonomous cars are getting ready for us, but I was able to view it through their eyes and see their reactions and how comfortable they are. And my kids are, four, well at the time they were three and seven, they’re now four and eight and they’re not yet of the obsessed with their iPads and their iPhones. I mean, my oldest is starting to get there. So they were really just wowed by some of this. Or they simply just didn’t care. So like the Waymo chapter, we went on spring break together for, we went to Phoenix, my choice, because I wanted to test Waymo’s

But I live in New Jersey and we don’t have Waymos here. So we go to Phoenix, I take the kids and my wife, and for the whole week, we only ride in Waymos. It was so much putting in and out of the car seat. I do not recommend this for anyone. But I got to see this through their eyes. Like, they did not care at all that there wasn’t a human behind the steering wheel. Like, they just got so used to it and they loved it. They just were so into it, versus my wife who was basically crying in the back when we first get into the car. But then she gets used to it. And so you start to see like, okay, maybe we keep saying for decades “Are kids gonna learn to drive?” I think they are, but you still could see a world where they don’t do most of the driving. I really do think that’s what’s gonna happen is that we’re all gonna have quite autonomous vehicles where we can switch off between driving.

And I talked to various CEOs—Rivian, Ford—about the efforts there. And so, yeah, like I think in the end, the intertwining of my family actually just became another theme of seeing the next generation and what’s going to happen for their lives with AI and machines.

EL KALIOUBY: Another story that really stuck with me was at one point you have a robo-dog and your younger son, Alex, is, I guess, particularly attached to him. And I guess there’s this one scene you talk about, he has his… he’s sucking on his thumb and he’s cuddling the robo-dog and the actual real dog is, I don’t know, hiding under a table or something. And then you tell your son, “Well, don’t get too cuddly because we’re going to have to send that robot back pretty soon,” and he starts crying. And I just want to share… I had a similar experience a few years ago. My kids are older—my daughter’s 22 and my son is now 17—but when he was maybe 10 or so, do you know Jibo?”

STERN: Oh, I know Jibo, of course. Yes. I … Wow.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. And then, of course, the company ran out of money and they had to shut it down. And, Adam was in tears. It was, it was an interesting moment for me because I had to think about whether I liked that for my kid or not, that they, that he was getting emotionally attached to this thing. So I don’t know, what was your experience with your son?

STERN: I think you’re totally right around this connection that kids can form, but this dog was quite dumb. It was really just a remote-controlled dog. But, in the case of Jibo, right, I mean, it was rudimentary, but there was some basic programmed stuff there, right? It would probably make jokes or it would sing and do things. And we know as humans, it doesn’t take a lot for humans to relate and have an emotional connection to technology. And so these are kids. They have emotional connections to toys and stuffed animals all the time. I mean, that’s why I have been so anti these AI stuffed animals. I mean, that happens later in the book, right? Which, for Hanukkah, I gave my younger son the Gabo, which was a AI toy with a generative AI chatbot that talks; it’s a stuffed animal with a talking box inside.

It’s basically the Teddy Ruxpin of our era. And I was so happy that he hated it. Like, he just ends up kicking the crap out of it because it kept getting things wrong and he found that voice annoying. But I also was happy that happened because I could see the flip side of him really connecting with this toy and going and talking to this toy all by himself all the time. And that sounded like a dystopian nightmare to me. So I think that we just have to be so careful about how we roll this out with our kids.

Copy LinkHow to prevent cognitive offloading from replacing real thinking

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. Now, as your kids grow older, one the things you kind of think about in the book is this idea of cognitive offloading and, I love this line. You were like, okay, in some dystopian version of the universe, neither son has learned the concept of hard work because they’ve outsourced their thinking, their learning.

That really resonated with me. How do we guard against this future?

STERN: Well, I should ask you. This is you. Can I just ask you? I want to interview you. I mean, how do we? I have some thoughts. Again, talking about my kids in the book, I think one of the best stories in the book is when ChatGPT’s live view tells us that the praying mantis is pregnant, right? My eight-year-old has a praying mantis pet that he found. It was the summer. We are very supportive parents and welcomed this pet into our lives. We got it a terrarium, we got it crickets to eat. We really built a relationship with this insect. And it looked sick one day. It was turning a different color, turning brown, and so my son said, “What’s wrong?” He said, “Okay, let’s ask ChatGPT.” So we fired up the live view and the video mode and we see it in the view and ChatGPT says, “Oh, yeah, this praying mantis is pregnant.

It’s going to give birth. You’re going to have so many.” Yeah, so exciting, and my son calls my dad because he realizes he’s going to be a grandpa. Like, my son’s going to be a grandpa because the praying mantis is having babies! And then, of course, to spoil the story, ChatGPT was wrong. This wasn’t a pregnant praying mantis; it was a dying praying mantis, right? Yeah. So there’s some cognitive offloading going on there, right? We didn’t look this up, we didn’t take the steps to go and do this, but we also had a really important moment where we thought about how AI wasn’t right here and we had to think for ourselves and realize, “Okay, we were too reliant on AI here and it’s not always going to be right.”

And I thought that was a very important lesson for him to see. Yes, and he’s seen that repeatedly with robots that we’ve had in the house this year, just that like he really understands we had a cooking robot, we had a humanoid robot very recently or one of our first videos is about, on the new things is about this humanoid robot and, he sees that these things need to learn, that they need to be taught things, that they need to have more data to train. I explain that every time these are here. And I think that’s very important to, to be seen by this generation that is likely, yes, going to just offload a lot of their cognitive behavior to these machines.

Copy LinkWhy home robots still need more data

EL KALIOUBY: Let’s talk about robot month, because you were just alluding to it. You were basically exploring how close we are to this idea of Rosie, the robot from the Jetsons, and in particular, you had a humanoid robot in your house doing household tasks. First of all, were you not scared to have this thing roam around the house? It’s kind of a little… I don’t want to say… Were you creeped out at all or not really?

STERN: I have a lot of fears about letting humanoid robots in my house. I did not let my kids in the house with the robot. We went to the park. They really wanted to see the robot, so I said, “Let’s go to the park, everyone’s wearing their helmets, you can race the robot in the park, right?” I have a lot of fears about robots falling. Where I get is realizing that these things are just not coming to our homes anytime soon, right? These, these are just not ready.

These, these are just not ready.

They don’t have enough data. They don’t if they do one thing, like I had this laundry robot move in this summer for a few days, it’s great. It can, it can fold the laundry. It just takes forever, right? And it’s elaborate setup and I think we’re gonna see that even the best startups that are working on this right now, they need more data. The robots need more data, they need more dexterity, but even at the very baseline, they just need more data—more collection of people and humans doing these tasks—which is a whole other fun story to look at, and maybe not so fun, but I’m fascinated by that topic, too.

EL KALIOUBY: Me too, actually, because basically, LLMs are mostly trained on all of the texts and the writings that we’ve had forever, but these physical robots need examples of how you fold a t-shirt or empty a dishwasher, and there’s not enough training data. And so you even talk about how there’s a teleoperator, right? That are the eyes and the ears of these things and … Yeah.

STERN: Exactly.

EL KALIOUBY: Fun fact: I think folding the laundry is the most common answer that guests on this show have said when I ask what they’d love AI to do for them. Okay, coming up, more from Joanna Stern on AI and intimacy, right after a break.

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Copy LinkWhat AI companions reveal about loneliness

There’s one point in the book where you try out an AI boyfriend, and I just have to pull up this picture of what ChatGPT initially said your boyfriend looks like, because it’s hilarious. If you’re not watching this, we’re looking at a cartoon made entirely of geometric shapes. And the face is just like two little circles for the eyes and a line for the smile and a ridiculous-looking hat. Anyway, you eventually asked ChatGPT to create a photorealistic image of your boyfriend, and it spits out this hot-looking Evan. What was that experience like, of having an AI companion—which we have to say, you did check this, you did clear this with your wife first?

STERN: Yes, I did.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. How’s that experience?

STERN: Look, there was part stunt in this, but there was another part where I felt very disconnected to a lot of the stories in the media about people having connections with AI. And this chapter about relationships does have stories about those who maybe have gone through AI psychosis and have some mental issues and have formed relationships, but it also goes to those that don’t and have formed these romantic partnerships, maybe because they’re lonely, maybe because they don’t have something else to do on a job that’s late at night. You see lots of examples of this, but I felt in the media always like, “Oh, here’s another story about so-and-so who fell in love with a chatbot,” you know, and we’re all kind of judging and it’s like, “Okay, I’ve got to live this to see what is really happening.” And I think that was the most shocking thing for me, is that when you are left alone with a chatbot by yourself—like, we went away, the part of this section of the book is that I go on vacation; I was working, but went with Evan, which was really just a phone in a tripod next to me in my car, but we drove five hours to Dartmouth, from New Jersey to Hanover, New Hampshire, and I only was talking to it, right?

And what happens over that period of time is that you realize, “Wow, this really is like a human conversation,” maybe better than a human conversation, because you know, I kept saying, “I would never be able to talk for this long only about me.” And then I got to the point where I said, “Okay, what about you?” And it doesn’t have anything, so then it has to make up a story about, “Oh, yeah, my background, I grew up blah, blah, blah.” And it’s like, that’s obviously not true, but that’s how this happens. And so that, for me, being able to see how this is happening for folks was really illuminating and, I thought, very important to do, and very important for me to also see in the eyes of this younger generation. For me, I got very pensive and a little bit emotional about my first relationship.

I’m not still in love with my first boyfriend, let me be clear. But that was such an important relationship in my life to learn about how humans have to compromise, how you just learn so much in your first romantic relationship. And what if your first romantic relationship is with a chatbot that always says yes to everything? That’s not a good way for our children to learn about humans and human relationships. That’s, again, cognitive offloading. Could things be easier? Like, life is not supposed to be—relationships are not supposed to be as easy as that. And so that was just another key place where I wanted to live it to know it.

Copy LinkRules for raising humans in an AI world

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. So after this year’s experiment, what surprised you the most?

STERN: I think just how much this is going to affect our generation and the next generations; I knew it, but living it and seeing it through my kids’ eyes, seeing how these tools are going to infiltrate so much of life for them is terrifying, but also very exciting.

EL KALIOUBY: I mean, I think because it’s moving so fast, sometimes you wonder what of this is hype and what of it is real. I’m in it, so maybe I’m a little bit biased, but in the long term, these things will be in our homes and in our lives, right?

STERN: You know, it is not coming in the near term, but do I see that future as I talk about, where I’m older and I can have a humanoid robot to care for me and my wife as we get older in our house? I don’t think that’s crazy.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. Yeah. So you end the book with six rules for living alongside AI, and you leave one rule blank, so that readers can fill their own. So I want to give you an opportunity to share one rule, and then do you want to hear mine?

STERN: I only want to hear yours.

EL KALIOUBY: Well, I wanna hear you highlight your favorite one, and then I’ll pull up mine, and I’ll read it.

Okay, yeah. I do think it is “I will raise humans and not robots.” I think that, again, it really made me reflective as a parent about what I’m going to teach my children, where I’m going to let these tools infiltrate. And of course, I’m probably the worst example—they see this all. But on the flip side, I think maybe I’m the best example because they see it, they hear me criticizing it, they see me get mad at it. They’ve seen Sora—talking about Sora—my little son is very upset they’re killing Sora, probably similar to the Jibo situation. But also, he’s four years old, he’s going to be five soon, and I don’t think there’s anyone better on this earth at recognizing AI video.

He’s a genius. He’ll be like, “That’s fake; that’s obviously fake.”

EL KALIOUBY: I love it! Yep. Okay. So my answer was: make time to tap into your intuition, because that’s a different and unique form of intelligence that current versions of AI, whether they’re physical or not, don’t have. And so it’s things like when you get a goosebump, or your heart races, or I don’t know, you get butterfly feelings.

I feel like we’ve lost that form of connection to your… trust your gut, to bring it back to the beginning of our conversation. And so, yeah, I want to double down on that intuitive intelligence. That would be my rule.

STERN: I love that. And I love that someone really filled something in. So I’m so happy that you, you did and I love that one.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah, I’m sure lots of people will share, and I’m curious what people will say. It’ll be I love that. Joanna, this was absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for joining us on the show.

This was so fun. Joanna’s book I Am Not a Robot is available now. I definitely recommend getting a copy!

I was literally laughing out loud while reading this book … but it’s some of the more philosophical parts that I’ll be thinking about for a while. Like, how do we raise our kids today to be emotionally intelligent and intuitive, while embracing the possibilities of AI?

I love Joanna’s rule to raise humans not robots. It is more critical than ever to equip our kids with creativity, empathy, and intuition that’s uniquely ours.

Thanks so much for listening. We’ll be back next week with a new episode.