Not Another Year-End Email

I’d love to say I woke up this morning feeling free. 

No more consulting AI on every big life decision. No more testing the robot that cooks my meals. No more AI boyfriend, AI therapist, AI physical trainer—or outsourcing parenting, planning, shopping, creativity and self-reflection to a chatbot.

Except that’s not the case. This is still my job and after a year of living this way, some of these tools genuinely made my life better. Others were spectacular failures.  

I did wake up with a few thoughts about the year I just lived. These are in no particular order:

• AI really is invading all parts of our lives—hosptials, highways, homes. This journey became far less stunt and far more about exploring all the places machines are helping—and potentially hurting—humans. 

• The technology is moving insanely fast. Just this year, image and video models got dramatically better. (Google’s Nano Banana edited the photo above in ways that just wouldn’t be possible last year.) Chatbots hallucinated less. Google finally started catching up in real ways, especially in search. Deep research and web tools became more integrated. Agentic tools began to work. Kinda. (See my recent WSJ story on the AI vending machine.) 

• These tools can take a real toll on our creativity and mental acuity. Do I still know how to write an email entirely on my own? Unclear. 

• A lot of this is hype. Using these tools every day—and living with a parade of robots and AI gadgets—made the gaps, the glitches and trade-offs painfully clear. The magic, do-everything AI is not showing up anytime soon.

• A lot of this isn’t hype. When these tools work, they save real time, unlock new ideas and help people—and yes, they can also replace them. The biggest impact, though, will be on younger generations—shaping how they learn, work and relate to machines in ways we can’t fully anticipate yet. 

Which brings me to how I’m spending today: as offline as possible. Playing with my kids on the beach, building sandcastles, kayaking and reminding myself what life looks like outside the prompt box.

Because soon I’ll be back at it: plugged in, testing everything, questioning it all and bringing you along as this future unfolds.

And in a few weeks, I’ll share more details on how to pre-order I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything. 

To see my tech predictions for 2026, check out my latest WSJ column with my colleagues.