We were in Taipei, packing up our little AirBnB to head out to the airport to go to our next stop on our trip, a resort in Vietnam. I’ve never thought of myself as a resort kind of person, but it was our honeymoon, and we hadn’t taken a vacation in years. We gathered all our things, I assembled the visa paperwork I’d printed out, and then, hmm, where was my passport?
“Have you seen my passport?” I asked A. This is not a good question to ask A. Immediately, I could tell I was under suspicion. My loose ways were certainly to blame, according to the look I received.
We looked everywhere. I had carried the passport in my bag the day before, and on retracing our steps, soon it was evident what had happened. We had wandered into a “vegetarian expo” being held at the conference center nearby, which had been very packed, back when being in compressed spaces bumping into strangers was a thing. Obviously, someone had reached into my bag, brimming with packages of vegan jerky, and light fingers had made off with my official ID.
OK, this was bad, but I mean, things happen when you travel. I felt mad at myself but then went into ‘how do I solve this’ mode. We took our bags, left the Airbnb, and got an Uber to the American Embassy.
The staff were not very comforting. It could take a while, they said. But I explained that we were supposed to be going to Vietnam that very day, and with some vaguely questionable charges that had to be paid in cash, I was eventually (about three hours later) handed a thin emergency passport with a harried photobooth picture to take away.
We went to the airport, where we had missed our flight, but we went to one of travel agent kiosks and booked another one. We got to the check-in counter and oops, the visa was now ineligible with my new passport. Oh, and was it refundable? We went back to the kiosk and spent a lot of time trying to convince them to help us, then spending a few hours trying to get online in the one corner of the airport where there was any wifi, refreshing in that horrible jonesing kind of way, like please please please just give me my fix. Finally, we found another Airbnb and went there, tired and dejected, and I re-applied for our visas, which perhaps would come through in 48 hours, maybe, don’t pin your hopes on it, according to the translation on the official government site, which appeared to be built with GeoCities.
We wandered around Taipei as we’d been doing, getting to know the underground malls, getting chilly and wet walking outside, and visiting various Starbucks–though Taipei is a coffee mecca, the idea of decaf coffee has not occurred, which, you know, I can’t fault them for. I contacted the resort and told them we were coming in a couple of days and not to cancel our whole reservation. Staying within the vicinity of wifi on the chance that a magical visa email might appear more quickly than expected.
After two days in the tiny Airbnb, I thought, if we’re stuck here, let’s at least be on vacation and found a hotel near the hot springs in the northeast outside the city. We got there in the evening, wandered around looking for plausible food, then discovered the email had arrived. I got online and booked our flights for early the next day. I booked an Uber that would pick us up at some ungodly morning hour. YES!
We woke bleary-eyed and stumbled down to the lobby, where our Uber was right on time. The trip to the airport was remarkably fast. Finally, things are working! I thought, until we opened the door to step out and realized, oh eff, this is not the right airport. Throwing our things back into the car, we sped for an hour through the still-fluorescent-lit streets to get to Taoyuan International, where we rushed to the ticket counters about 30 minutes before the flight was scheduled to depart- and couldn’t find a ticket counter for our airline. Finally, someone explained that since the window to check in had closed, the counter was now being used by another airline.
Our marriage had lasted for six months, but I wasn’t sure it was going to make it through this. I could not think straight, I just was like, “there must be a way to get to Ho Chi Minh City today and we’re going to find it.” And so, I found myself in a conversation with a guy who was a travel agent, I guess, kinda? He seemed to know the people at the ticket counter and had access to tickets for flights that were no longer booking online. How much was this going to cost? A lot. And we weren’t going to get our money back for the flights we missed. A was by turns furious and incredulous as I allowed this dude to take pictures of my credit card as watched him flirt with the ticket agents, brandishing multiple phones, and eventually producing tickets that took us to Saigon, luckily where it was warm with a little spa outside the airport terminal, and then to Ho Chi Minh.
I’m thinking about this trip because it’s the kind of crazy situation that results from a combination of typical travel hijinks, my own ADD (choosing the wrong airport, for example), and technology systems that create their own layers of bureaucracy on top of what is already bureaucratic, like visas and airline ticketing. Will such situations be a thing of the past as we develop more effective AI?
What would this have looked like in a world with AI managing my affairs? I mean, just having AI deal with the visa in the first place would have been amazing. (I suppose there’s also an argument that just having a different human than me responsible for all the arrangements might have ultimately saved us money and heartache).
I am very good at discovering deals or hacking together possibilities, but I am not great at keeping track of all the details later. Could AI be the answer to my executive function deficiencies?
Imagine a world where all these systems we’ve built talk to each other, in that convivial style we’ve already seen with ChatGPT. Oh, hey, airline system, my AI might say, let me look at all the flights you have scheduled, match them up with all the hotel rooms and Airbnbs in the world, and take my [owner? friend? client?]’s preference into account along with any paperwork involved and get amazing deals that involve no real compromises at all. I mean, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
My AI could be going through all my email, noting the things that need my attention, and deleting or archiving all the dross. It could be making arrangements with other people’s AI so there’s never a need for calendar games. I mean, all of these things are what people have assistants for, but obviously AI could be even more effective, since it can scan a zillion things in no time and access APIs hidden these days from humans.
Maybe being ADD won’t matter when most of these memory and time management functions can be taken care of, especially in a world where AI can just ask you what you want with no data entry required.
But I wonder then, what will we need ourselves for?
One could get very Buddhist here and recognise that the self was just a construct anyway, so the purpose of oneself is, in a way, just to be, and if you’re next-level, to notice your being and how everything around you is also how you’re being (social networks, systems of domination, ecologies, quanta, whatever). I like sitting in the storm of all of it and feeling it gust against me.
Another way of thinking about this has to do with value. Naturally, in the way things are set up now, one’s access to an AI of this kind, and perhaps the access the AI has to systems it can manage, will cost something.
I haven’t yet read Bullshit Jobs, but what I infer about the concept tells me that the onset of technology (in the context of ‘late-stage capitalism’) thus far has only pushed us into having far more bureaucratic responsibilities than ever before. We spend less time being creative and less time in real connection and more checking emails and websites and looking at analytics and scrolling and liking and dealing with more and more paperwork, even if the paper part of it isn’t visible. If we actually read all the terms of service we’ve agreed to in the last 10 years, we probably wouldn’t have had time to eat or sleep. My stepson has 20+ apps and sites he has had to learn to navigate for academic assignments, and has yet to read a book after a semester of high school.
The trend is definitely in the wrong direction, but it seems like it could change. It could remove the need for all kinds of trustees of paperwork, but then what?
We developed money, it seems, in large part to deal with lack of trust. You might be fine extending credit to people you know or who is part of your general community, but maybe not so much to a guy with a weapon who you don’t know from Adam. Graeber suggests that we have money for one main reason- armies.
Once we had money, we could use it to buy things or pay people for doing a service, but then things got more weird. People started accumulating money just to have more money, and then power and money became more synonymous. I’m really compressing this- please do read Debt: The First 5,000 years where it’s more expansive. But the way one accumulates money depends on there being ways to multiply money, which turn out to largely be loans of one form or another.
So in our current system, I can get money by working for someone who pays me for the time I spend working, or by making a good that someone else buys, by producing goods from farming or extraction of natural resources, by selling things I ‘own’, or by offering a service that someone else pays for. Alternately, I can loan money and demand interest or fees as a condition of the load, or I can make an ‘investment’ in which I will get a return, should the business itself produce money in one of the ways outlined above.
In all these scenarios, I now have money, but what can I do with money? I can purchase things and pay for services. Some of these things are necessary for my survival, whereas others may make my life more convenient, easy, or pleasant, and others might signal my status. (Side hot take question: do you only need status signaling in types of work where what you do is largely unnecessary?) Alternately, I can use the money to make more money, and this is where things maybe go off the rails, but OK, it’s a thing).
In a future where we don’t need so many people to produce needed goods, or to perform valuable services, what are people going to do? And what will we do about money?
On the plus side, I won’t have to have systems to organize my to-dos and I’ll have a lot fewer to-dos of the kind that seem boring but necessary.
I think I am lucky, very lucky, in fact, that not only do I have systemic advantages, being white and educated, but I also already spend much of my time making meaning for myself, which does seem like one of the things no AI can replace. It doesn’t mean that we’re all suddenly going to have the freedom to spend our time meaning-making, of course, but I do have that pragmatic optimism, that if we can avoid burning down the world (a big if) then perhaps we’re going to see big, big systemic changes as the unsustainabilty of what we’re doing now becomes readily apparent, not just environmentally, but also in the way we’ve become bound to superficial levels of meaning.
This morning I was in a dream in which I had forgotten to go to the airport for my flight, and a huge sense of relief came with the realization that I could wake up. Maybe that’s on the horizon for us all.