Reviews for I am not a robot : my year using AI to do (almost) everything and replace (almost) everyone
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
A field report from the front lines of everyday AI reveals a revolution already unfolding in our hospitals, classrooms, kitchens, cars, and inboxes. In this slyly tongue-in-cheek, often unsettling account, technology journalist Stern chronicles her AI-enhanced life. She tried out self-driving cars, chatbot companions, digital fitness coaches, AI-written emails, robot masseuses, mechanical pets—even AI-generated music, literature, and life advice. The result is a highly personal portrait of what it feels like to stand on the edge of technological transformation. Her concise timeline maps the territory, starting with the 1955 Dartmouth College conference at which John McCarthy, an assistant professor of mathematics, coined the term “artificial intelligence.” Stern describes an “AI Zoo” of machine learning, neural networks, deep learning, and generative AI, as Artificial General Intelligence and Artificial Super Intelligence loom on the horizon. The book centers on Stern’s experiences, and the reader learns of AI’s impacts on her mammogram and dental imaging. The first incorporates AI as a superhuman pattern recognizer, augmenting human expertise, while in dentistry, upselling is an unfortunate byproduct. Stern interviews influential thinkers, including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who foresees therapeutic AI-enabled mobile devices extending medical care to underserved populations. He notes, “Most people in Africa never meet—ever during their life, when they’re born, when they die—what the US would call a doctor.” AI is also reconfiguring education and employment. Daniela Amodei, the president of Anthropic, argues that Generative AI has already entered our classrooms. Amodei says, “Learning should be different because a lot of their life is going to be different because of AI.” Self-driving cars terrify and amaze Stern’s family, while robots in her home provoke laughter. Of her trial intimacy with chatbots, the author concludes, “A connection with a machine isn’t a substitute for messy, inconvenient, irreplaceable human intimacy. AI is a mirror. Don’t mistake it for more. And please do not have sex with your smartphone. Or laptop. Or desktop. Or expensive monitor.” A tech journalist tries life shaped by AI in an amusing, semi-scientific, thought-provoking experiment. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Publishers Weekly
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Tech journalist Stern debuts with an entertaining exploration of AI’s impact on everyday life. Stern spent a year using as many AI tools as possible, enlisting the technology to monitor her health, provide career advice, plan meals, and travel. The results alternate between hilarious, hopeful, and foreboding. On vacation in Phoenix, Stern, her wife, and their two young children agreed to be chauffeured by self-driving cars wherever they went. On one excursion, the Waymo driving Stern and her seven-year-old son braked sharply and veered within a few feet of a concrete wall, apparently reacting to Stern’s videographer, who was leaning out the window of another car. “It was the only time I’ve ever been genuinely scared in one of these cars,” Stern says. Elsewhere, she reflects on enrolling in a college class, where she quickly learned she could get good grades while putting in minimal effort thanks to ChatGPT, sparking worry about the technology’s impact on critical thinking. Still, Stern acknowledges that without the editing, researching, data processing, and interviewing assistance provided by AI, writing this book would have taken her at least six months longer. Stern’s balanced, clear-eyed assessments and crisp, funny prose (“I was teetering on the edge of the AI-byss”) make this stand out among the growing crowd of books on AI. Illus. (May)
