AskMaps

We're in a weird place with AI now where some people are doing 1000x more with it and also 85% of people don't use it at all. I really don't know where any of youse are on this, so I don't know how useful it is for me to suggest AI things to try.

Still, in case it's useful: if you're AI-curious but not sure where to start, one suggestion I have is AskMaps on Googlemaps. AI is good at a few different things, but one of them is searching a messy and unstructured heap of data in a way that wasn't possible before. Maps is a great way to have that experience as an entry point to figuring out what AI is/isn't useful for.

For example, you can ask the AI questions like "I'm driving from Philly to Johnson City, what cool attractions are there along the way? I like quirky museums and bizarre roadside monuments". The AI will give you a shockingly good answer; I and mine have been to several awesome places this way.

You can also ask it things like "what cool events are happening near me today? I'm interested in country music and acrobatics" and it will likewise give you a surprisingly good result.

The crux here is that all this information already existed in the ether, but there was no way I could realistically sift through it previously, so I missed out on lots of events and activities I would otherwise have enjoyed. Maybe if I was on holiday I would spend 3 hours looking up things to do each day, and click through all the different web pages to find out which things are closed on Tuesdays and which special events are happening just tonight. But realistically I wasn't going to do that on Sunday morning when I'm like "I have two spare hours now, is there anything happening near me?"

Once the cost to search this messy data goes down from 3 hours of your effort to 3 mins, you unlock the ability to do things you couldn't previously. What new things are possible that weren't previously once all map and event data are meaningfully searchable?

And then: what other areas of life are like this, where a bunch of messy data existed but it wasn't practically worthwhile to search it, and now it might be?

This AskMaps trick has had a very meaningful impact on my life already, because I did literally ask it "are there any exercise classes happening near me today" and ended up with a class starting 30 mins later and a new hobby. As usual, I think it's important that while you can certainly use AI to fall into a hole of alienation from your fellow humans, it is also possible to use it to connect with other humans much better, and on an individual level that's (at least for now) a choice you can make by how you use it.

My usual caveat: if you think AI is evil, none of this applies to you! It profits a man nothing to sell his soul for all the world, so certainly not for "fun things to do next week on my roadtrip Wales." But if you don't have deontological objections and just don't know where to start with AI, here's a place to start.