698: Joanna Stern - How to Think for Yourself in the Age of AI, Why Deep Work Still Matters, Making Career Decisions With ChatGPT, and How to Stay Human on Purpose

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

Joanna Stern shares her year-long experiment using AI in every aspect of life, from health to career decisions, emphasizing the importance of maintaining human judgment and deep work. She discusses practical leadership a

Key takeaways

• AI enhances decision-making but shouldn't replace human judgment

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Welcome to the Learning Leader Show, presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learning leader. Now, on to tonight's featured leader, Joanna Stern, spent an entire year. year letting AI into every corner of her life, her health, her marriage, her kids, her therapy, and she even had an AI relationship on a burner phone in her nightstand drawer. Joanna is an award-winning journalist, a 12-year veteran of the Wall Street Journal, and the best-selling author of I Am Not a Robot, My Year Using AI to Do Almost Everything. During our conversation we discussed why ChatGPT told her to quit her job at the Wall Street Journal, and then why she actually listened to the advice and did it. Then we discuss which AI tools will help you become a more effective leader, actual practical use cases for people in leadership roles that you can implement right now. Then we talked about her conversation with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, chat GPT about his thoughts on AI in the future and how Joanna feels about that. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Joanna Stern. This episode is brought to you by my friends at Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing and professional services company dedicated to being the light to the world around them. If you need to hire one person, hire a team. of people or transform your business through talent or technical services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. Hiring can be tough, but hiring the right person can be magic. Visit Insightglobal.com slash learning leader today to learn more. That's Insightglobal.com slash learning leader. I loved reading the dedication of your book to your mom and your dad who taught me to think for myself and the AI's, robots, and machines that maybe wonder if I really was. What do you mean by that? Well, when you get further into the book, you see me talk a lot about how AI might be doing a lot of the thinking for us, that we are outsourcing thinking in a lot of places. and wanted to dedicate this to my parents when I was really thinking about in the age of AI, what did my parents teach me and what can I teach my kids? It is to think for ourselves. You know, it is not to outsource the thinking on everything we do. So that was the inspiration there. Thank you for reading the dedication. Of course. Hopefully you got a little further, but even if you didn't, that's great. Well, you know, we kind of start and then maybe we'll bounce around. Maybe I go to the very end because I also like some of the stuff and the acknowledgements, but I am curious about the part because you're a parent, I'm a parent, the part about helping you think for yourself. I want to do that as a parent. How did your parents do that for you? Well, I think for me, my parents always encouraged me to be me. I grew up. I was a big tomboy. I just was trying always to be my own person. And my parents just said, okay, they didn't try to limit that. I had a lot of my own different interests, some of them being technology, my parents said, okay, yeah, that's cool. We'll buy you some gaming systems. We'll buy a new computer for the family. And so I think encouraging our kids to be themselves and to think for themselves and to just be their own selves, not just to go along with the crowd is a huge part of parenting. I love that. Another mentor that you mentioned is Walt Mossberg. You said a year-12-year arc at the journal that he played a big role and was important in your life. What did you learn from Walt? Well, first of all, Walt made it possible for every tech journalist and frankly, every tech creator out there today, whether you're a YouTuber or you're an Instagram or TikToker, whatever you do, Walt Mossberg invented this. He invented this idea that technology, which is made for humans, should be reviewed by humans, that we should be looking at this stuff. He's famously said in his first column, computers are too hard to use, and it's not your fault. I think without Walt Mossberg, we don't have an industry where we review products, at least in the way of really thoughtful reviewing. I mean, maybe we would have still gotten Amazon reviews, and no offense if you're an Amazon reviewer, but it's not always the most thoughtful review. I mean, look, you also know this, Ryan is an author. Sometimes you get some really thoughtful book reviews on Amazon. You also get some really not thoughtful book reviews on Amazon. So for me, yes, I could even talk about what Walt did for me personally, but just as an industry leader in journalism and in the technology industry, there's no one like Walt. What happened in technology journalism and what happened in tech reviewing doesn't happen if there wasn't a Walt. I love hearing stories about people we look up to, especially as someone's accomplished award-winning as you who's built this amazing career who's currently in their prime, that you still have this kind of reverence for the people who've helped you, like your parents, like Walt, and there's many others that you mentioned. But I want to get to this idea of AI, because when I first saw this, initially, Joanne, and I was like, I don't want to talk about this. Like, I don't want to talk about how somebody outsourced or at least dependent on AI for a lot. And then I actually got into the work and loved it and really wanted to talk to you about this, because I have this, whether it's like anywhere online or LinkedIn or some of these places where everyone just copy and pace so much AI slop that it just makes me not want to talk about AI. However, I think the way that you looked at it is different and unique and useful for all of us. So can you talk to me about the reasoning behind this book behind dedicating 365 days to solemnly swearing to live with the machines as you pledged and why you wanted to do this? The reason I did this, I think is actually And part of the reason you were skeptical of this, right, is the AI slop we started seeing, you know, years ago now, two, three years ago. And you had that, right? You had this kind of really distrust, like, why do we need this technology? And then you had the tech industry and these tech leaders in what I've now started calling hyperbole maxing of AI, promise, dreams, hopes, and changing of the world. I mean, it was just insane what you heard from these leaders. And we still continue to hear from these leaders, right? AI is going to cure cancer. AI is going to change education. We're all going to have a personalized tutor for our kids. It is so miraculous this technology. Yes, this technology also can harm us and kill us and humankind, but it is also amazing. And so I don't want to take a dumer approach. I didn't want to take the zoomer approach. I just wanted to write for the normal person, the normal person that has kids, as we've talked about, the normal person that has a job, the normal person that goes to the dentist or the doctor's office. the normal person that drives the car, how is AI going to affect all these parts of your life? And that was the whole reason for doing the book, was just, let's go on a journey together to find this out. I'm going to focus on health care, because this was interesting to me. And your mom, cancer survivor, and then you go in, and I guess got a mammogram and ultrasound, is that accurate? And you sit with your radiologist, Dr. Lorry, who also then is using it. using AI software. Can you talk to me about this moment and what you learned from AI and your actual doctor? Yeah, this moment was really impactful for me. And it happened at the beginning of the year. And we didn't actually know we were going to structure the book. We thought, okay, maybe we're going to structure it by topic like healthcare, education, et cetera. And then it sort of worked out like, oh, let's do it as the year progresses. And so at the beginning of the year, like I always get my annual mammogram. And I decided, okay, I'm going to try to put AI through all of my health decisions this year. That meant anytime I was sick or the kids were sick or the dog was sick, I was going to ask AI. It meant I was going to have it interpret test results. But I also wanted to go to the doctors who were using this. And radiology is the one that is really the most far ahead because of deep learning and what was happening years ago with taking huge data sets of imagery, in the case here, mammograms and ultrasounds, running those through models, being able to see, have the AI see at a pixel level in a way that humans can't see where there might be cancer because there are millions of these images more than any human radiologists could see in their lifetime. And then they've got the test results, right? So they can put those things together into a model so the AI can see, oh, that looks like cancer. Oh, that looks benign. Don't worry about it. And so went out, went to this doctor, who is now my real doctor, because I just enjoyed working with her and seeing her so much work, and watched her read my mammogram and breast ultrasound alongside AI using a tool. Now, this is not, I'm sure your listeners are smart enough to know that she's not just using chat GPT, right? These are custom models that are made by health care companies. They're FDA approved. So there's a lot of rigor and back end to this. That's not just, you know, off the shelf technology. And watching her work side by side with this was fascinating. What she originally saw in what I describe in detail in the book is there were three spots that look suspicious, the AI fly. is suspicious. And two of those spots, she didn't think were anything. She used her knowledge. She looked back at other imagery and said, yeah, no, these things have been there. They're not growing. These are not cancerous tumors. We don't need to worry about these. But there was one where the AI marked it. And she said, yeah, I didn't see that. I would like to keep a closer eye on that. I'm marking that. I'm going to order some follow-up testing. And it just really, to me, illustrated. I'm fine. You know, I continue to be monitored because of the high risk that I'm under. but what this really illustrated for me was just how closely she was working with the tool. It wasn't replacing her, which there's been years where people, Jeffrey Hinton, who's this godfather of AI, has predicted that radiologists would just disappear in five years time. He said this around 2018 because of deep learning. And that's just not what happened. Radiologists are now working more with AI. And there's a shortage of radiologists, they say, in this industry, just because it's not as appealing for people to go into. So they're able to do more and they're working side by side with this tool. Well, the cool thing is it sounds like it's helping them get better. That's what she says. I mean, and when I left the office, I asked her flat out, you know, has AI ever found something here? Has the AI ever seen something on these scans that you didn't see and ultimately saved a life? And she said, absolutely. But she also said the flip side, which is that there are many times where she catches something and the AI didn't catch something. I thought they were built to see more than it's actually there. So one of the potential problems is it scares you when you really don't need to be scared. That can happen. That can happen. And that's why the human involvement is so important, right? The human can go back and look at previous scans and say, look, this was here. Or I have seen something similar here. But where humans, and I tried to find a radiologist who was not a fan of this technology, I really did. I tried. I spoke to four or five of them. Everyone likes using these tools. Yeah. They're not against it. They're absolutely not against it. In fact, there were some that I was saying, I don't want to work without these tools. I'm curious, so that seems like the perfect use of this technology, right? It could literally help save lives. It can make somebody much better at their job. It's not replacing them. In fact, it's just making them better. That seems perfect. The other complete end of the spectrum is I think of, well, I mean, I see like the cover or even on your website. You look like Terminator 2, Arnold Schwarzenegger, with the machine hand. And that's like the doomer side of things of, well, what if a company, maybe Anderol or something like that, these weapons that we're selling to both our government and others, somehow AI takes over. That seems wild to me, but hey, anything can happen, I guess. What did you find when thinking about that potential end of, oh, my goodness, are they going to take over and start fighting wars without a human even being involved or a human telling them to do it? This is the greatest question of our time, right? The same technology that can solve the issues of cancer and all the promise of drug discovery and keep humans living for longer and do all of the things, solve economic inequality and all of our problems is the same technology that can do as you just described, right? Autonomously send missiles off to your house. I don't know, or whatever bunker studio you're in right now. That looks very cool. I guess you're safe. You're actually safe in the bunker studio. This is my bunker studio just in case. Go ahead. Sorry. And I felt that I was trying to grapple with this at the societal level, but maybe not at the political level. Yeah. That's because I think, you know, as humans, we don't think about that every day. But I was grappling with the same thing on a more personal level of how we live our lives, which is the same technology that is helping me, the large data sets and the ability to use deep learning to look for cancer, is the same technology that's actually also making it really simple for us to talk with chatbots all day and mislead us and do things. Or the same technology are the big data sets and the real models, this transformer models and all of this stuff that's actually unlocked the amazing ability for cars to drive themselves that could make the world much safer, right? Again, same sort of big technology that could be used in a lot of, a way that could program those cars to not know how to drive in a certain way and run people