Joanna Stern spent a year living with AI and allowing robots to do everything for her...what she discovered proves why they'll never replace us

There are two ways to think about AI. One is to ask the big philosophical questions. For example, if AI gets better than us at the activities we pride ourselves on – such as thinking and expressing our thoughts – will that alter the way we think about ourselves?

The other way to think about AI is to ask the smaller, more practical questions. Is it going to steal our jobs? Most important of all, will it help with the laundry?

This friendly new book by American tech journalist Joanna Stern takes the second approach. I Am Not A Robot is one of those books where a writer chooses to do something bizarre so they can write about it. It’s also one of those books where a journalist with experience in a particular area – Stern has been writing about technology for the Wall Street Journal for more than a decade – decides to stretch their legs and see if they can break the 200-page mark.

Such books often begin with a pledge. Stern commits to living with AI for a full calendar year. So, in every way she can, she incorporates it into her life in New Jersey, which she shares with her wife Michelle and two young sons. Then she reports back on the ways in which it was fun and helpful. And the ways in which it was a total disaster.

Another pledge she has taken is to make her book as accessible as possible. AI can be scary, not least because most of us don’t really know what it is.

With this in mind, our author kicks off with a super-helpful glossary. She defines Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI). That’s the one where the AI (a computer program that thinks a bit like a human) can do one thing well. Self-driving cars are a good example of ANIs.

Then there’s Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). That’s the one where the AI can do a lot of stuff as well as we can. We’re not there yet but we’re getting close. Finally, we must brace ourselves for Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI). That’s the scary one, after which we will ‘no longer be the smartest beings on the planet’.

I Am Not A Robot, then, consists of a series of encounters with ANIs, all described in breezy journalistic prose, and dotted with details designed to help the medicine go down.

So there are some jolly, childlike cartoons that are meant to make us smile. And the dingbats (those tiny typographical symbols, like asterisks, used to break up the text) are playful.

When Stern visits the doctor for an AI-driven mammogram, for example, the dingbats are little stethoscopes. Then, when she has her teeth examined by AI, they are molars.

I have to say, my molars started grinding pretty quickly at this kind of thing. I wished that Stern could have been a bit more stern.

If we can only read prose interspersed with doodles, I predict that AI will overtake us soon. Next Tuesday, perhaps.

Having said that, there is a very good reason why I don’t think it will happen: most of us are highly skilled at creating and responding to verbal nuance; AI is not.

This is beautifully illustrated by a moment when Stern, who has been letting AI answer her messages, gets a text from her wife Michelle, asking if she can come downstairs and help make lunch for the children. ‘Sorry,’ Stern’s AI responds on her behalf, ‘I have other plans.’ To which Michelle, understandably, replies: ‘WTF?’

AI-powered robots are comparably clumsy when it comes to doing the housework, Stern discovers. When confronted, for example, by a T-shirt dropped on the floor, a laundry-folding robot struggles even to work out what it is, let alone fold it. Meanwhile, a dishwasher-loading robot takes five minutes to load three items. That’s even longer than my wife.

Published a month ago in America, this book is already hailed as a New York Times bestseller. I have to say, I’m surprised. The writing feels lacking in confidence. It’s less confident than, say, Stern’s own writing as a journalist.

Sometimes it’s just odd. Lying on her back with her laptop against her knees, the author compares herself to ‘a raccoon guarding a bag of chips’. At another point, she describes someone as moving ‘with the energy of a juggler’.

She confesses at the outset that she didn’t use AI to write the book, but she did use it in the editing process. To which my first response is: editing is part of writing. My second response is: how come AI didn’t say: like a what guarding a what? How come it didn’t say: with the energy of a what?

There are nice things in the book. Stern landed short interviews with some of the biggest bigwigs in the AI world. Bill Gates waxes lyrical about how AI is going to bring life-saving medical care to millions in Africa. Sam Altman (CEO of Open AI) tells her, essentially: everything is going to be fine. Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he.

Perhaps best of all – I found it genuinely touching – is a moment near the end of the book when Stern worries if what she’s writing may be rubbish. Any author can relate to these feelings, which come in waves. Stern being Stern, she consults AI.

She asks some chatbots to review her manuscript. But one of the big problems with AI is that it’s a yes-man. This is why it cannot really be our friend. It tells us what we want to hear. So the chatbots reassure Stern that her book is ‘genuinely funny’ and ‘deeply human’ – although what on earth AI knows about those qualities is anyone’s guess.

All of which brings us back to our original question of whether AI is going to steal our jobs. The short answer is: some of them.

For a longer answer, here’s Mikhail Burtsev, a leading AI researcher I work with at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences.

He tells me, ‘The most profound transformation will be more human-to-human interactions. It’s the more tedious jobs that will be automated. This will mean that the value of services requiring face-to-face interaction will grow. People will spend more time interacting with each other.’

And I would add one more thing to that. For the time being at least, we’re going to need our human

book reviewers.