AI Makes Travel More Important Than Ever—Teaches What AI Can’t And Gives You An Edge Over ChatGPT – View from the Wing

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Some of you think that AIs are going to eat the world. Others think it’s just for hallucinating events that didn’t happen, or making cat videos. The truth is that the latest models hallucinate much less, it was important to fact check people, and the best AIs are smarter than most (nearly all). That’s happened quickly, and so the question isn’t ‘what are we doing with them today’ but ‘how will they remake the world over the next few years’.

I’ve written that I probably wouldn’t have AI replace co-pilots on commercial planes, although soon they will clearly outperform humans, and pushing back against AI co-pilots will compromise safety.

Already people plan their travel mostly online, doing it themselves, because all but the priciest trips lack the margin to have the supplier pay a real travel agent. Soon AI will do a much job planning trips, which is why Expedia is laying off people but spending heavily on AI.

But that all misses the forest for the trees. AI seemingly knows everything because it trains on everything. That makes knowledge of facts far less important. It’s a better technical writer than you are (and I am). What it isn’t is human and that makes what’s distinctively human still valuable and more important than ever.

Here’s a piece of a longer discussion that I think makes an important point about the future of travel, without doing so explicitly. Travel is going to matter more than ever because of AI because informal knowledge and social networks will take on greater importance.

  • The AI knows everything that isn’t secret.
  • Your knowledge of public information will approach zero value.
  • What isn’t published, then, becomes relatively more unique and valuable.
    ‘
  • Trading secrets’ – getting out and having discussions with people, trading off-the-record information and gossip becomes more valuable.

    The internet, and zoom, connected people online and in some sense reduced the need to travel. Many business meetings that were once in-person now happen over Teams. Your job might even mandate Return To Office but you find that you still log into meetings where other employees are back in the office, too.

    But AI will increase the returns to social networks. Some of that happens through online communities, Telegram chats, WhatsApp… but often those relationships are still formed and nurtured in-person.
    AI effectively increases the relative return to and importance of in-person and therefore travel. (And AI will help us plan and get more out of travel, too.)

    [I]f you want to get things done, you’ll need to mobilize resources.. you’ll need humans.. your network of humans is not 20% more valuable, it could be 50x more valuable.

    The most effective people will have an army of AIs at their disposal so are that much more effective. It’s going to be far more than Delta using AI to extract more money from passengers.

    I do think AI will know more secrets than this discussion gives it credit for, remember Google tracks all the movements on Android phones, stores your email, AIs know what you ask it and can surmise why. But instead of ‘no need to travel because the AI tells you anything you’d learn’, forming personal relationships and gaining special insight will give you information you can’t get from AI and gain context that will help you effectively prompt, understand, and filter what AI tells you.

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