Travel, AI, and the Things We Cannot Explain

I attended an entrepreneur summit in Lisbon last week, and there was an interaction that made a dent in me. As in any of these events, you get to know many people, different backgrounds, experiences, where you share your business with them and likewise. I engaged on day one with this engineer who came up with this AI solution, and I have to be honest, I could not understand a word he said or what the solution solved for. I have no doubt his business was very niche, so there was no reason for him to "dumb it down" a notch for me to better understand it.

He then asked me what I did. I told him about Brighter Latitude, and he proceeded to say this was a dead-end idea because AI was soon going to get enough data to replace people planning trips, how the reason AI is not there yet is just because it is missing more data.

We then dived into a very interesting conversation exactly on that topic. I argued that the experience of traveling goes way beyond the information you can gather for the plan, how the experience can't be understood by any AI solution just because of the nature of it.

I gave him an example that opened the conversation and made him question his stance. I asked him if he had a family. He told me he was married and had 2 kids. I asked him if the love he had for his family could be simplified to data, given the feelings he had for them were just chemical signals in his body. I asked him if I could plug him into the Matrix and reproduce the very same signals into his body, would there be any difference to the actual feelings he had for his family.

This idea prompted a reaction in him, clear rejection. That was exactly my point all along. Me being factually correct, feelings are chemical signals, not more, not less, does not make the love he had for his family meaningless. The notion that there is a way to manufacture these via AI, drug, or any other piece of technology, that could capture the profoundness of the human experience takes the deepness out of it. I am not asking why, it just does.

What can be said and what can only be shown

This made me think of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his ideas about the limits of language and explanation. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein draws a distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown. His famous closing proposition is:

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

But he also refers to things that cannot be put into words, yet somehow make themselves manifest.

And perhaps this is the point I was trying to make without having the words for it. There are things that are true about our experience that cannot be fully explained by reducing them to their constituent parts. Explaining the chemical processes involved in love does not explain love. Explaining the neurological response to awe does not explain what it is to stand somewhere extraordinary and feel overwhelmed by it. Explaining why we feel free does not capture what freedom feels like.

Fulfilment, love, freedom, awe, cannot be captured via a physical means alone. They are, in some sense, metaphysical concepts. And perhaps there are more things that are true than things that can be explained.

That does not make the facts unimportant. Quite the opposite. It simply means that knowing everything about the mechanics of an experience is not necessarily the same as understanding the experience itself.

Where the limits of AI travel planning begin

And that, to me, is where the limits of AI travel planning become interesting. A machine can know an extraordinary amount about Costa Rica. It can know the roads, the hotels, the weather patterns, the distances, the reviews, the opening hours, the wildlife, the beaches and the statistics.

But knowing all of those things is not the same as knowing what a particular journey will mean to a particular person.

So perhaps we should make travel a spiritual practice. Let it fill you with the metaphysical magic that cannot be rationalized, measured or explained. Let it surprise you, move you, change you. And, above all, let it fill you.

Enjoy your trip. Make it worthwhile!!