Where Travel and Life Intersect

The Surprising Reason the People Building AI Want You to Travel

Their argument is for the humanities. Travel is the humanities in practice.

The people building our AI economy have, in the past year or two, started talking like humanists.

Netflix’s Reed Hastings says if he had a three-year-old today, he would be “doubling down” on emotional skills, not STEM. Daniela Amodei, a literature major who is president of Anthropic, has said the humanities will matter more than ever. It is a remarkable rhetorical turn from an industry that spent two decades treating these fields as impractical.

Here’s what’s really going on. They are quietly admitting that their tools are good at retrieving what is known and hopeless at the experience of coming to know.

Travel and the classroom

Nowhere is this more visible than in travel. You can use AI to plan a trip down to the hour. You will not use it to experience the afternoon you spent on a bench because the museum was closed, or the baker who pulled you under his awning when the storm started.

Travelers aren’t alone in this. Drew Lichtenberg, who lectures at Johns Hopkins, told Maureen Dowd of the New York Times recently that he had been shocked by what his students were reaching for last semester. They wanted Kant on the sublime, Nietzsche on existential nausea, and Camus on Sisyphus. None of it was assigned. They wanted it anyway.

It isn’t just one classroom. At Stanford, computer science enrollment has fallen for the first time in twenty years. Students are reading the room.

What’s slipping away

What’s actually missing is harder to name. It is the slow experience of coming to know something in your own time. And it is in danger of being lost. The students reaching for Kant want it. So do the travelers who keep returning to the same town.

What intentional travel gives you back is harder to put into words. It is taking time to learn the icons and stories that shape how a country sees the world. It is Saturday night in a Mexican plaza full of families and children at an hour when American children would have been in bed, and the recognition that this is a country that has answered a question your country has not.

Pico Iyer said it cleanly back in 2000, in his classic essay “Why We Travel”: travel is “the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places.” He wrote that before any of the current tools existed. The pattern was already visible.

The research backs him. Adam Galinsky, a psychologist at Columbia Business School, has spent two decades documenting what happens to people who spend real time outside their home culture. They show measurable gains in creativity and in openness to strangers. What matters, Galinsky has found, is depth of engagement, not the number of trips taken. Stamps in the passport don’t do it.

Still yours to do

None of this will surprise the Nomadic Spirit reader. The practice the tech world is finally articulating is the one you have been quietly working at for years. The stakes have just gone up.

In the next issue, we will discuss what AI does well for travelers. There is more there than you might think. None of it changes what we have been talking about here. The work of actually being somewhere is still yours.

Destinations worth traveling for — and understanding once you arrive

Iona, Scotland

When people set out specifically to think about what it means to be human, the Camino de Santiago often comes to mind. The medieval pilgrim route across northern Spain draws roughly half a million walkers a year. Iona is the quieter answer to the same question, and the one most travelers haven’t heard of.

A Small Island

Iona is a small island off the west coast of Scotland, three miles long and a mile and a half wide. A ten-minute ferry from the Isle of Mull gets you there. The rock under the island is called Lewisian gneiss, notable for being some of the oldest in Europe, roughly half the age of the Earth. Saint Columba landed here from Ireland in 563 to build a monastery. Pilgrims have been coming ever since.

The Celtic Christians had a phrase for places like Iona. They called them “thin places,” where the veil between worlds is thin. George MacLeod, who founded the modern Iona Community in 1938, said only a thin tissue separates the material from the spiritual on Iona. The phrase has spread far past its religious roots. Travelers who don’t consider themselves spiritual use the phrase after they’ve been.

What makes Iona thin is simpler than the language suggests. Cars aren’t allowed, and shops are minimal. The sea is on every side, and the abbey is the tallest building on the island. After a day or two, you start thinking about things you hadn’t had time for.

The English writer Samuel Johnson said something similar in 1773, when he and his friend James Boswell visited the abbey ruins on their tour of the Scottish islands. He wrote that a man was little to be envied “whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.”

A National Geographic Traveler writer (linked in Further Afield below) made the trip earlier this year. Within two days, they had settled into the abbey’s rhythm: meals in the refectory and evening services in the candlelit church with the wind off the Atlantic rattling the windows. Iona’s rocky shore, they wrote, “still feels like a good place in which to grow wise.”

How to Go

Getting there is part of the experience. Train from Glasgow, ferry to Mull, bus across Mull, ferry to Iona.

Most visitors don’t stay. Of the 130,000 who come every year, the majority are day-trippers off bus tours from Oban or quick stops from cruise ships. They get two or three hours, see the abbey, walk to the harbor, and leave on the last ferry. They haven’t really been.

Two or three nights is the minimum, ideally more. There are a few small hotels (the St Columba and the Argyll), a bishop’s house, self-catering cottages, and B&Bs. The Iona Community runs week-long residential programs at the abbey, meals included, no faith required. Independent travel works just as well. You can walk the island end to end in an afternoon. After the day-trippers leave on the 4:30 ferry, you have it mostly to yourself.

Go in May or September if you can, and stay at least two nights.