I thought of this as soon as I saw they were using something based on blockchain. Given who the people are that founded this thing, I was surprised.
I don’t know, but again considering the founders, I have to think that they couldn’t come up with another alternative.
Nah, there is a lot of following the trends in this type of decisions.
If we’re going to end creative endeavors for the common man at least we can have fun while we’re doing it:
The movie will be out this year where everyone wakes up and bank balances are zero… and then it might actually happen… I’m not sure how having all these bots scraping data everywhere feeding the AI glutton cannot lead to some really bad outcome at some point that is on a level not yet imagined… Its already bad enough how many breaches are happening everyday. I think I saw today some user complaining about Gemini scanning their PDF’s without permission. How do you regulate something like that when soon nobody will have any idea what has be read and transfer and to where… Does anyone really know the reach of these things as they are thrust upon us.
How much data was stolen by the AT&T breach… these sorts of things up to now have possibly taken some clever people with a decent set of resources…now give them AI tools and lets see what they will be able to do…
Off the grid is sounding better and better as time goes on…
This is great 
That channel has other good ones.
Was listening to Suspicious Transaction Report podcast by Royal United Services Institute the other week that briefly referred to fears that states and/or organised crime were already grabbing strategic encrypted data in the expectation that they will be able to unencrypt it at some point in the future.
Planning some fall photography?
A new interactive map will help American photographers plan the perfect fall foliage trip this year based on historical data, machine learning algorithms, and public reports.
LOL …
Somehow, all of these AI companies advertise how their products will help you plan your vacation. Gemini will book your flights! ChatGPT will select your hotel! Siri will create your itinerary!
I am… flabbergasted by that suggestion. That’s the absolute LAST place in my life I’d trust an AI with. Vacation is the one time where I don’t have a boss telling me what to do! Where I can actually do what I want. A thing I look forward to, and that I enjoy planning and anticipating!
But perhaps it’s as they say, “I wanted AI to do my dishes and laundry, so I can do more art. Instead, I got AI to do my art so I can do more dishes.”. Just one more way to suck all joy out of life, and leave only the menial tasks for us human cattle.
All things considered, given how people often get their vacation ideas and or recommendations from the internet, google’s index, articles and social media; AI or at least some form of algorithm or another has been influencing their vacation decisions for a long time.
I’d say ChatGPT could be a less biased source than all others previously mentioned. It’s true he has his internal bias and probably those of all the travel content he was trained on, but it’s more diverse than a single person (or even multiple), and could provide a talk with the user to reach a destination that fits his preferences.
This is a bit different than what you mentioned about AI controlling your entire vacation, but I’d say it’s a powerful tool to help you plan it. Thoughts?
Or you can ask actually existing humans (so far) on local subreddits for suggestions, which then become a searchable database for others. I guess if it becomes difficult to distinguish humans from robots and trust is lost, that’s reducing choice not adding to it. There’s an element of homophily to gathering info from humans, as we look for cues to judge the credibility and relevance of the source and info to us as individuals. I can’t imagine that being replicated anytime soon by ai so you end up with generic mush skewed by advertiser interests for a long time.
I completely agree with you. My point was more for the general population. From people I know most get their trip ideas from the sources I mentioned above and in the end the “AI” must be the least biased of all the popular non human and non corporate sources available.
Edit: Whilst reddit is popular in the anglosphere, it is much less popular outside of it. Forums are dying and choices dwindle.
Getting trip recommendations from someone you know nothing about makes no sense. People have hugely diverging interests and expectations.
Respectfully disagree. We’re highly tuned to reading and investigating cues from other humans on whether our interests are aligned thanks to 100s of 1000s of years of evolution. AI is a commercial black box
An ai would be even worse than anonymous people. More likely to give some generic recommendations unless, of course, its fed with your entire internet history.
I would never go to places recommended by my family, they are nice people but have completely different interests.
Now for loose suggestions to look into anyone’s ideas are welcome but you then have to do the work actually researching it anyway.
I think you made my point for me here, tbh.
I like Hugo Mercier’s concept of “open vigilance”. We’re open to new info that might improve fitness but are vigilant over its source and content and whether interests are aligned.
Even when we look through crowd sourced reviews for hotels or restaurants on websites, which are a quite impoverished one-way information source, we’re constantly gauging the credibility of the info, how many people reviewed it, were there good reviews because it was cheap or high quality, are these real reviews, is someone being vindictive for something that wouldn’t bother us, etc.
Of course, it’s imperfect but we want some info not none or not bad info
Edit: I think we’re not really in disagreement. I just wasn’t very clear in my earlier post on how we remain sceptical even while seeking advice from others
Power usage isn’t really a block chain problem. All the contributions to entropy by the crypto currencies are made by solving their “merit of work” puzzles.
Traffic and storage could be a problem, if the D in distributed isn’t confined to some places but spread on all users. And it sound to be that way.
Depends on how it proves its work. I’m not super into blockchains, but all of them that I’ve seen are super wasteful in one way or another.
When I retired, wife and I set an objective to travel heavily in the first three years, owing to observation of friends who couldn’t due to encroaching infirmity or loss of one of the partners. Doing so, my wife has become somewhat of an expert on cruise vacations - all the logistics. She frequents a few of the cruise-oriented forums, interesting places, some even host sub-forums for specific cruises. A bit of non-critical thinking goes on; someone will ask a question, if my wife has specific experience with it, she’ll craft a well-considered answer, and about 1/4 the time, she gets a “that’s crap!” response from either the questioner or some other poster, with no cogent counter-argument.
AI “travel agents” are not going to help these people… 
Sheesh. Some people
Just you wait. In a few years the AI on your phone will tell you “that’s crap!” when you ask it how to silence some notification.