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.