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Here's the Scoop
Tech Unwrapped: Holiday Gadgets, 2026 Predictions & AI Insights with Joanna Stern
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- [00:00]
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Yasmin Vasugin
Hey everybody, and welcome to here's the scoop from NBC News. I'm Yasmin Desugin. So the holidays are now officially over and we are in that weird week before the new year where days of the week do not exist and people are looking for the gift receipts. It was a huge year for technology in our household. My kids got new iPads for Christmas along with watches. And I am thinking about getting an AI assistant. So for that I want to bring in Wall Street Journal's senior personal tech columnist and NBC News contributor, Joanna Stern. She is a tried and tested expert on what to keep, what to return, and what we can look forward to in tech in 2026. Hi, Joanna.
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Joanna Stern
Hi. How are you?
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Yasmin Vasugin
I'm good. It's great to have you. Let's start with gifting. What was kind of the big, big tech gift this year? The theme of the tech gift this year?
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Joanna Stern
Well, I think it was largely the usual, right. You mentioned iPads and watches and iPhones and smartphones. But I think there were two new categories this year. One was this next gaming console. And funny enough, I have been using this for a number of years in my house. But this is a small gaming console that got a lot of because it's really interactive. So do you remember the Wii? The Nintendo Wii?
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Yasmin Vasugin
Yes, of course.
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Joanna Stern
Yeah. Or the. There was the Xbox Kinect, where you could be in front of your TV and there was a camera and you were in the game. So it works really similarly to that Kinect idea. And so this is a small box you plug into your TV and it has a camera on it and you can jump into these games. And so this gift just completely blew up and they sold hundreds of thousands, this company, mostly through retailers. But I would not be surprised if many listeners got one.
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Yasmin Vasugin
What do you mean you jump into the games? What does that mean?
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Joanna Stern
So, like, I'll explain one that my kids play a lot, which is Fruit Ninja. Right. So Fruit Ninja plays on the screen. You stand in front of the TV and in front of the little box and camera and you're swiping your hands and cutting the fruit.
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Yasmin Vasugin
Got it.
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Joanna Stern
And so you're in the game.
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Yasmin Vasugin
You put your body in the game.
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Joanna Stern
That's right. That's right.
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Yasmin Vasugin
Versus just using the like the little hand thing.
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Joanna Stern
Yeah, there's no controllers. There's no controllers. That's the word controllers. But yeah, no, that's exactly like Kinect used to have a motto that was you are the controller. And it's very similar to that. And what I love about this is that there's actually just games for every age group. So my 4 year old loves playing the bluey game, my 8 year old loves the Fruit Ninja game. There's fitness games for adults. And I think that one of the big reasons this has become really popular is one, it's super affordable, it's $250, but also it's interactive. Right. And we've been hearing so much about screen time and we also know that not all screen time is equal. And so yes, you are watching a screen and you are playing a game, but you are active and you are playing with somebody else. And I think that's one of the big reasons this has become a hit.
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Yasmin Vasugin
I mentioned like looking for the receipts now, right after Christmas, what do I keep, what do I return? How do you decide what to keep and what to actually return? What is kind of the tech gift of yesteryear and the tech gift that is great for the future?
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Joanna Stern
Well, look, I think it depends truly on what you need. Right. So if you got another iPad, but you still already had an iPad, that was really good, please return that new iPad. Like we don't need more e junk laying around our houses. So many of these devices, especially Apple and Android to a degree, can just be upgraded and really feel like new with software updates. Don't really need the new hardware as.
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Yasmin Vasugin
I gave my children new iPads.
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Joanna Stern
I mean, but look, you know, right. You know what your kids need.
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Yasmin Vasugin
To be fair, they were cracked.
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Joanna Stern
Okay, but we, we might have been able to repair the screen, right?
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Yasmin Vasugin
Yes.
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Joanna Stern
So if you can repair the screen or you can fix the, or replace the battery, I mean, this is a big theme of a lot of my work is like don't buy till you know this thing is on its last legs. And so I would actually look at your gifts and say, you know what, we can actually return this. We can get two more years out of this old iPad. Or this old iPhone because we can upgrade that screen and get that new battery and you'll get a credit to the store or you'll get money back. I think a big one. And I, I, NBC did a great piece on this. But look, if you got an AI toy, even if someone just was like, oh, I saw this AI toy being promoted on Amazon and I got it for you, whether, you know, maybe Aunt Sally or Uncle Bob or whoever it is, you know, who doesn't really know and just got your kid AI toy, I'd return it.
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Yasmin Vasugin
Haven't heard the story about the AI toys actually saying all these nefarious things to children.
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Joanna Stern
Yeah, yeah, I just return it. I would just say, you know what, we don't need any AI toys in our house. Let's, let's return that right away. Having tested them, by the way, with my own kids, these are my guinea pigs and they test things for me. And luckily none of these AI toys said anything terrible or inappropriate to my kids. But I just, the idea that my child is talking to a chatbot in a stuffed animal and is continuously talking to it is just, I don't, it seems a little, the image is just dystopian and I don't want it. I don't want to say no, you.
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Yasmin Vasugin
Know, your kids are going to go to therapy in the future, but you don't want them to go to therapy with what they learned from their AI toy.
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Joanna Stern
And I don't want them even going to therapy with an AI toy. You know, like.
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Yasmin Vasugin
Let'S talk about AI because you have been writing a book about living with. I talk about what you have been doing and why you're doing it.
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Joanna Stern
Well, look, Starting last January, January 2025 and will be ending now was my year in AI and I tried to take over my life with as many parts of or as many parts of my life with AI or robotics as possible. And it didn't happen all at once. But I've tested everything from self driving cars to AI and medical to really robots in the home. All of the things that we keep hearing from the AI industry are going to change our lives. And I wanted to see what is actually going to change our lives. And so yes, a lot of it was chatbots and using chatbots in different ways as friends, as lovers, as therapists, as you mentioned.
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Yasmin Vasugin
Yeah.
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Joanna Stern
But a lot of it was also a lot more of the physical ways that AI is going to come into our lives, whether that be in cars or robots or a robot chef that I tested. And so wow. The book is gonna give you a big picture of where life is headed in a number of years with all of these advancements, but really where humans are headed and how we have to grapple with machines, doing more in our lives.
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Yasmin Vasugin
How difficult was it for you to engage with all of these different types of AI?
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Joanna Stern
I would say it was difficult to try to find all of this stuff, because what I tried to do is live five years in the future and that some of this is just not here yet. One of the things that was really clear to me is that we are not here yet, and we are hearing a lot of hyp around things that are just not quite ready. And so there was a lot of personal strife that went into this as I challenged myself to talk to an AI therapist for a number of months, to just read AI books for a whole summer. I challenged myself just to listen to AI music. And so those things took a real toll on my health, really, because you do not want to listen to AI music. Let me tell you, for an entire month or more. Okay.
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Yasmin Vasugin
There's so much to unpack here. Joanna, I have to say, I'm here for you. I want to hear some of these stories because you talk about talking to an AI therapist or listening to AI music. What was it like to talk to an AI therapist?
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Joanna Stern
Well, as someone who's been in regular therapy for a long time in my life, or on and off, it's shockingly familiar in some ways. And that's because these AI therapists have been trained on therapy.
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Yasmin Vasugin
Yeah.
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Joanna Stern
And I talk a lot about this in the book is there's a lot of debate about how to train the best AI therapists. Do they train them on hours of conversations? That's a big way that this is happening. They've gotten lots of recorded data of real people in their therapy. Hundreds of thousands of those conversations go back into the model so they can train the AI to have very similar reactions and questions that you would have in a real therapy session. So that's what I mean. When he says familiar, like, you almost laugh. There's a couple of places where you'll be like, you know, when a therapist might say back to you or repeat back to you what you've said, or, oh, that's really interesting. Tell me more about that. Or how did that make you feel? Or let's go back to that. Right. And there's so many of those familiar things. So you're like, oh, wow. Like, this is really just regular therapy. But of course it isn't. Right? There isn't a human behind the bot. And there isn't any real memory or real sense of self or sense of, of understanding totally the big picture. It can fool you in a way. And so while I do think there's a real place for this kind of AI therapy, especially when you look at the mental health crisis happening in our country and the fact that many don't have access to this and either there's a stigma around it or they don't have the money or the means to go to a therapist. This is, I think it's a real future what we need to see, and it might happen in 2026 where we see regulated, approved versions of therapists.
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Yasmin Vasugin
Well, that's what I was gonna say is, you know, a danger to all of this. As we have seen with the number of Lawsuits pending against AI companies OpenAI character, AI meta because of their chatbots and the allegations that have been made, including children that have led to suicide to self harm because of the conversations and the ongoing relationships that these kids had with these chatbots.
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Joanna Stern
100%. And that's where I think this is all heading. And maybe we won't get it in 2026, it's probably being a little ambitious. But I think we will get eventually approved and regulated versions of AI therapists which have the right guardrails. They're programmed possibly for specific cases, maybe addiction or anxiety or whatever it is. So there's a lot of guardrails and you can see what's happening behind the scenes. But that's not what we have right now. Right now we have the Wild west and it's really, it's really freaking scary.
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Yasmin Vasugin
All right, we are going to take a very quick break and when we are back, we're going to talk more about AI in 2026. That's next.
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- [11:55]
Yasmin Vasugin
And we are back with here's this group from NBC News. I'm still here with Wall Street Journal senior tech columnist and NBC contributor Joanna Stern. What are some other big takeaways that you made in your year in AI? The positive and the negative?
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Joanna Stern
Well, the positive is, is that there's a lot really every industry will tell you. The personalization and the access. 24. 7. Right. Humans can't work 24. 7. This is the ability for our cars to not fall asleep at the wheel. This is the ability for us to talk to that AI therapist in the middle of the night. It's the ability for that AI radiologist to not be tired because they were sick the day before or up late with their kids. Right. There's this total utopia where the machines don't have the same as humans.
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Yasmin Vasugin
Right.
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Joanna Stern
And things are just far more precise and done by the rules. And that is the beautiful vision of it. And I think that's one of the pluses that we can see. Then of course, there's what we were just talking about on the therapy side, which is there isn't a human behind it. And humans, yes, we're full of flaws, but we are creative and we see things that a machine might not be trained to do. And in fact, we saw that with Waymos. Are you familiar with Waymo?
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Yasmin Vasugin
Yes.
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Joanna Stern
And the self driving cars. Yep. So we saw that at the end of the year, Waymos are driving around San Francisco. There are tons of them. They're basically starting to outnumber Ubers. And there's a power outage. The power goes out and the waymos can't function because they can't see the traffic lights.
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Yasmin Vasugin
Yeah.
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Joanna Stern
Right. They, they don't know how to function without the traffic lights. And so yes, waymos may be inherently more safe that the data is showing that. But humans. Right. And that's why they're more safe, because humans have all these flaws. And you can talk to any personal injury attorney who would tell you why humans are just terrible behind cars, why we're terrible. Dr. I talked to a number of personal injury attorneys for the book. But then you have this flip side where the traffic lights go out and the machines have no idea what to do. And humans of course, know what to do. Right?
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Yasmin Vasugin
Right.
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Joanna Stern
We know how to communicate with the other people in the car. Maybe somebody gets out of the car and starts directing traffic. These robots have no idea what to do. They completely lose it, and they just shut up and they're, like, sitting in the middle of the street freaking out.
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Yasmin Vasugin
You know, before we move on. The robot chef.
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Joanna Stern
How did that go? The robot chef, I will say, is still in our house. What? We tested it at the end of the year. And I don't want you to picture that it's like a humanoid robot. It's actually a machine that has some robotic arms in it. And you prep the ingredients and you put them in the machine, and it has everything else that you sort of need to make different meals. And so there's a tablet built into the machine, a touchscreen. You select the recipe you want. It tells you which ingredients to load. And there's also basically a stove top built into the machine. And so we've made a couple of things. Potatoes, butter, chicken, some soup. And so you just put in the ingredients. You press the button. You can also customize it. You don't want as much salt. You want it to be healthier. And you press that button and it takes care of everything. It, like, dumps in the things at the right time. There's image recognition through a camera. So it knows the chicken is done or it knows that, you know, the consistency is done. When it works, it's actually kind of amazing.
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Yasmin Vasugin
I mean, it sounds like a game changer for me.
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Joanna Stern
Yeah, when it doesn't work, it is disastrous. And my kids are just like, dumb robot, dumb robot. You know, because one time or a number of times, like, there are these little containers and I forgot to put something in the container, and the robot just keeps dumping nothing in. It's just like, smash, smash, smash. And it's like, there's nothing in that container. Robot you just are continuously dumping nothing in. And the kids think it's hilarious. Anyway, this device is called the Pasha P O S H A. And it's early days for robot cooking. But I really do think this is. This is going to be something.
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Yasmin Vasugin
So this robot chef sounds a lot like kind of the most advanced AI agents, which. Which we've been hearing a lot about recently. And I know AI agents are supposed to be able to complete complex tasks with limited oversight. Where are they helpful? And then where do they, in fact, screw up, as you mentioned?
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Joanna Stern
Well, actually, this isn't. I wouldn't say it's a great example of an AI agent. In some ways it is, because it's autonomously taking a number of steps, but it's pretty programmed. This robot on the other hand, what we've seen with AI agents is, you're right, there's this idea that AI agents should go out in the world and do things for us, multi steps that we don't have to intersect and help with, Right? So in the case of the robot, the cooking robot, I don't have to oversee it, I don't have to tell it its next step, and I can trust it to do that. What's been happening with AI agents in more of the generative AI world is that is this idea that we will have these AI agents or coworkers or assistants that will go out and take multi steps for us, right? You'll say, I want to go to Mexico on vacation, and it will do it all. This is the dream, by the way. This is not happening right now. And it will research the hotels, it will tell you your flights, it will book the. It will do all of the things, right. And you'll just maybe give a little bit of input and it will take all of those steps for you.
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Yasmin Vasugin
Is that kind of where we're heading right now at this time next year? Are we all looking at having a possible AI assistant and. Or AI slash human assistant, combining the two?
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Joanna Stern
I don't know if it's at the end of next year, but I do think it's maybe at the end of 20, 20, 27. I think that what we've seen, and I've seen in so many of my tests this year, is that these agents fall down at certain tasks. A human has to be what they call in the loop. A human comes in and helps.
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Yasmin Vasugin
Right.
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Joanna Stern
And so the issue right now is that the humans have to help a lot more than they should. I did an experiment at the Wall Street Journal where we had an AI vending machine. And it was supposed to be a test of an AI agent that was running a business. And this was from Anthropic, one of the biggest AI labs. And they said, hey, we're going to have our Claude bot run this vending machine as a business. You just. The bot can help you order what you want, you can say what you want it to be in the vending machine. It sets the prices on the vending machine to make money. It can also tell you when there's needs to reorder inventory. And it was a pretty complicated experiment because I invited all of my colleagues, not all, but 70 of my colleagues, my closest friends at the Wall Street Journal, to come talk to this bot in Slack.
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Yasmin Vasugin
Yeah.
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Joanna Stern
And what happened was disastrous. Not only did the Bot start giving things away for free after a period, but it just started ordering anything we would ask it to. We said we need a PlayStation and we want it for free and it would do it. We wanted a live fish. It did it. And so it completely went off the rails. Now, Anthropic gave this to us to test the guardrails because they wanted to see how, you know, where the AI agent broke down. But you kind of see what happens when you have humans who are, you know, a little bit nefarious or maybe aren't and just start using this thing and it starts breaking. And I was overseeing it all, but this is. It went wrong. Like it was just chaos. And so it just is a good. It was a really good marker of where we are in time. Yes, these things can go out and do these things on their own. Yeah, you just might not do the things you want them to do on their own. And then who's left to pick up the pieces? The humans?
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Yasmin Vasugin
Well, and then there's the question of guardrails. I know the president signed an executive order this month to limit states abilities to regulate AI. Do you think we're going to see more of regulation on AI in general as we move ahead? And does really kind of the government. Does Washington have the ability to regulate AI in the way in which they should? And what I mean by that is, do they know what they're doing?
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Joanna Stern
I make a really big point of this at the end of the book, and I think I'm scared about it. I think anyone should be scared about it. If you're understanding. And this is why it's so important for all of us to start to understand these technologies. We need regulation. We need regulation in a much bigger way than we didn't get with social media. And we've seen the fallout of social media. Yeah, I think we will get regulation around certain things. I think that there's enough attention from both the left and the right, and it really is a bipartisan, I think, around AI and children and the right things that need to go into these models to make them safe. I think what isn't going to come is some big overarching set of rules across the board for everything else. I think the big concern, I think, from the administration and from the AI companies is that we're going to get this patchwork of rules that it's going to just preoccupy the companies and we are not going to win, quote, unquote, the AI race with China.
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Yasmin Vasugin
Well, that's why I ask about Whether or not they know what they're doing. Because I think we saw it with social media in that you have a lot of lawmakers that are of a certain age that aren't necessarily tuned in to the way in which social media works, with the way algorithms work, and yet they're trying to make rules and regulations to safeguard against social media without necessarily knowing how it works. Right. And so I'm wondering if the same thing is happening with AI, which we.
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Joanna Stern
Know even less about 100%. I think you're right on the money. And I think the good news is, is that simultaneously we have had those lawmakers wake up to what's happening with social media and smartphones. Right. We are seeing more of that happen. We aren't seeing as much happen in our country as we are seeing in others like Australia. But we are seeing a patchwork of work to, to improve the safety around social media for kids in this country. And I think we will see AI lumped in there.
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Yasmin Vasugin
I want to talk about the AI bubble because you've got these big tech companies fueling the stock market this year. It's been great for investors, great for, for those of us with four 1Ks, but they're not turning profits yet. Right. Trillions and trillions of dollars now have been invested in AI but there's no profits. Is it going to burst? Is the AI bubble going to burst the way that the dot com bubble did or is this different?
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Joanna Stern
Well, there's a lot of theories here. I think the feeling is that the largest companies will not burst the OpenAI's, the anthropics, that they have in some ways become too big to fail and have such connections deep into some of these bigger companies, the Nvidias, the Microsofts, the Amazons, that there will be sort of this flywheel effect and these companies will continue to grow in some cases anthropic, which I think all eyes should be on. That company in 2026 are nearing more profitability and they are seeing that their focus on enterprise and companies and the adoption of that happening in the workplace is going to benefit a certain fraction of the business. So I think that these large companies are just going to continue to grow. The fallout in the bubble that we did see in the dot com era, it could be some of these smaller companies, right? We've seen a lot of these smaller AI labs raise tons of money and be valued at billions and billions of dollars and they haven't shown anything for it yet. And I think those are the ones we will probably hear more about in the next year or two years. I don't want to say they'll completely go under, but I think just we'll be have more of a reality check around them.
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Yasmin Vasugin
Going into 2026. With AI increasingly becoming more and more part of our lives, what is one big rule of thumb you think folks should take away from this conversation?
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Joanna Stern
I think it's understanding these and understanding where in your life AI is actually starting to make an impact. The way AI is starting to change both medical and dental, it's shocking, but AI may already be reading some of your X rays and some of your scans and I think it's about just paying attention to these things because there are ways behind the scenes that AI is going to start to make decisions for you or make decisions for your doctors or make decisions for or that car that's driving you or that robot that you didn't realize is actually doing something. And I think just the more we have understanding of it, the better off we're gonna be. And it goes back to what we were talking about social media. We didn't pay attention enough. I think the masses didn't. We just knew, hey, we really like this thing it's doing. Like I love my Instagram feed, I love my TikTok feed. I have so much entertainment and we didn't pay attention enough to how things work and the harms that can be caused from it.
- [24:42]
Yasmin Vasugin
Wall Street Journal Senior personal tech columnist and NBC News contributor Joanna Stern. Her upcoming book is called I Am Not a My Year Using AI to Do Almost Everything and Replace Almost Everyone. I cannot wait to read it and have you back on the show then. Thank you Joanna Stern.
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Joanna Stern
Thank you so much for having me.
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Yasmin Vasugin
And that is gonna do it for us. Thanks for listening to Here's a scoop of NBC News. I'm Yasmin Vasugin. We'll be back on Monday to continue our series of year end specials with a deep dive on the suprem, the cases they are reviewing in 2026 and the impact they could have on laws and our democracy. It's going to be a great conversation with two of our smartest legal minds, NBC News senior legal correspondent Laura Jarrett and NBC News Senior Supreme Court reporter Lawrence Hurley. I'm looking forward to that. Until then, have a great weekend everybody. And if you like what you heard, subscribe. Wherever you get your podcasts, we'll see you then.
- [25:38]
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- [25:45]
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