1352: Joanna Stern | The Year I Outsourced My Life to AI

About this episode

I Am Not a Robot author Joanna Stern spent a year letting AI run her life. She reveals what it's actually good for — and its hidden costs.

Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1352

What We Discuss with Joanna Stern:

• How a chatbot that never tells you your ideas are dumb becomes less of a companion and more of an emotional slot machine — and why the always-available AI therapist that remembers your every 4 a.m. anxiety is both a genuine comfort and a quiet, compounding cost to real human connection.
• Why you can spot exactly where AI falls short the moment it wanders into your own field of expertise — and how that very gap, between confident output and actual competence, is the most important lens for judging whether these tools are ready to replace the humans who do the work.
• What it really costs to hand AI your medical results and financial data for a quick second opinion — and why stripping out your name, birthday, and identifiers matters when the convenience of instant answers quietly trades away privacy you can never claw back.
• How genuinely impressive humanoid robots and robotaxis are as feats of engineering — and why the viral demos of drink-pouring androids are often a human in a VR headset puppeteering from offstage, revealing the gap between dazzling spectacle and true autonomy.
• How you can learn these tools well enough to know what they're genuinely good at while fiercely protecting your own lived experience — because the messy conversations, shower-thought sparks, and uncomfortable human friction are exactly the training data no machine can hand you.
• And much more...

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