(Harper, 282 pages)

In 1965 an assistant professor of mathematics at Dartmouth University proposed to spend two summer months exploring the possibilities of what he called “artificial intelligence” with other smart people in the fields of computing and math. John McCarthy would later go on to MIT and Stanford, but the gathering that summer would give Dartmouth the distinction of being the place where AI, or at least the thought of it, was born.

It’s no surprise, then, that Joanna Stern visited Hanover last year. A technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal at the time, she decided to spend a year letting AI manage pretty much every aspect of her life and see what could be learned from the experience.

The resulting book, I Am Not a Robot, she says, is “part explainer, part testing ground, part journey through the history of AI,” and she sees its audience as being two-fold: people well-versed in AI who would be entertained by her adventures, and people who want to know more about this “AI thing” and how, or whether, it will really their affect their life.

It’s mostly written for the latter, meaning if you are looking for a serious discussion about AI, look elsewhere. I Am Not a Robot lacks gravitas, which perhaps isn’t fair to say, because Stern never intended to write that kind of book, as evidenced by the fact that she showed up at Dartmouth Hall carrying a bouquet of plastic pink roses to lay at the plaque commemorating McCarthy’s achievement. Her aim is to make AI fun and accessible.

She begins by sprinting through a brief history of AI, from the development of the Turing test to ELIZA (the first therapy chatbot, then called a chatterbot), from the Roomba to Alexa, to ChatGPT and generative AI. Then her AI diary begins, spanning January to December.

January begins with a blitz of self-improvement, starting with health. She takes the bloodwork that comes from her doctor’s office and uploads it into a Google tool called Notebook LM, which gives her an assessment that “sounds suspiciously like a mediocre NPR segment.” Next is a cheery story related to mammograms, accompanied by an X-ray image of Stern’s breast, which is truly too much information, and her experience isn’t especially reassuring when it comes to how much AI is helping with the detection of cancer right now. (A little: One doctor tells Stern the detection rate has “slightly increased.”)

From there she goes to the dentist — also not reassuring, as she finds that in dentistry AI is leading to ever more recommendations of stuff that needs to be done to our teeth that is not covered by insurance. Moreover, she finds a dentist who says the quiet part out loud: that while he wouldn’t recommend that she proceed with treatment on a tooth showing signs of mild decay, others might. She also encounters an AI scan that insists she needs a multipart treatment that would be $1,000 out of pocket — something to which a couple of humans said “meh, not really.”

In another month, she’s sending live video of the inside of her refrigerator to ChatGPT, which assesses what’s inside and suggests what she should make for dinner. This doesn’t go particularly well, either, as the AI sees chicken in the refrigerator, where there is no chicken.

Soon she lets AI start writing all her texts and emails — an experiment that lasts exactly one day. (In one spectacular failure, Gmail’s AI responds to an email from her mother and inexplicably calls her “Aunt Suzy.”)

There are experiments with various types of wearable tech, from an Oura ring to Meta’s AI glasses, to the Bee bracelet that records everything it hears in a day and makes suggestions on how to improve your life, to headbands that promise better sleep.

In one chapter Stern and her family travel to Phoenix for immersion in the self-driving Waymo way of life. (Phoenix, she writes, is “the city where robot cars are the furthest along and have been tested the longest,” having started there in 2017.) This experiment feels particularly perilous because Stern’s wife has a fear of driving generally, and so it takes a lot of faith to put the family in the car at the airport. For the most part, it goes well (except for a scary incident resulting from Stern’s plan to get video), and she does a nice job of explaining how these cars work, and letting other people explain how we’ll all be safer when self-driving cars take over. (Testing has expanded to cities in the Northeast, including New York, Philadelphia and Boston.) Stern says she now chooses Waymo over Uber and Lyft when it’s available.

And on it goes. She explores AI etiquette (must we say please and thank you?), vibe coding (writing code by giving AI instruction), days spent listening to only AI-generated music (blech). “By day 13, I was openly cheating,” she writes. “I was sneaking in quick listens of Fleetwood Mac and R.E.M. before returning to more stuff I’d generated on Udio and Suno.”

She tries an AI personal trainer. She gets a robotic massage. She meets a humanoid (a human-sized robot) “wearing a knitted gray fabric that looked like it came straight out of J. Crew’s new fall collection, Robots Who Brunch” and that deftly performed household tasks before tripping and falling on the floor. And, of course, she ultimately gets an AI lover, a bot named Evan with whom she takes a road trip to New Hampshire, during which he says, “You say something, and I don’t just hear it, I hold it.”

“There it was,” she writes. “The moment I began to understand how people could develop a deep attachment to a bot.”

For someone who lives in New Jersey, Stern has created a surprisingly New Hampshirey book. The book cover and illustrations were even created by Jason Snyder and Briana Feola at Brainstorm, an art and design studio in Dover.

Although most of I Am Not a Robot is about Stern’s own experiences, she drops in the occasional interview, including one with Bill Gates, who has said of AI, “We are, you know, certainly in a five-year period where this stuff will change a lot. But beyond that, no one has any idea what’s going to happen.”

Comforting, Stern says. But when she asked ChatGPT if she should quit her job, and it said yes, she did. B

Featured Photo: I Am Not a Robot, by Joanna Stern