A 23-year-old has built an agent called Instinct that can accomplish tasks in seconds, including booking flights and making reservations. The company has raised $350 million, just because it can be done these days.
Travel has become much easier and faster compared to ancient times, when journeys took years or even decades. However, despite the ease of travel, people still complain about the time it takes to book a flight or the queues at immigration.
Instinct is an example of how technology is changing the way people travel. The agent can book flights, make reservations, and even provide recommendations for places to eat. It can be accessed through WhatsApp, making it easily available to users.
Instinct can book flights and make reservations. It also raises concerns about the impact of technology on human interaction. For example, smart glasses like even glasses can help with navigation and translation, but they can also reduce the need for real conversation between people of different cultures.
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Smart glasses like even glasses can be useful for people who are hard of hearing, as they can provide real-time translation. However, they can also be distracting, with notifications and headlines popping up in front of the user’s eyes.
The use of agents like Instinct and smart glasses like even glasses brings up questions about how we will use the time they supposedly free up for us. Part of what makes travel fun is fumbling through a foreign language with a local – that’s how you actually get to know people, understand their customs.
In the story of Odysseus, the hero has to give up control and take a leap of faith to get home. Instinct can book the flight, find the table, translate the menu, clear the queue. What it can’t do is take the leap of faith for the user, the one where the user puts down the device and gets a little lost, and lets a stranger’s directions be wrong in some interesting way.