Today’s Big Story

AI Will Plan Your Next Trip

From Chatbot assistants to Instagram reel-generated itineraries, AI is transforming how we book a vacation

What’s not being touched by AI these days? Thrillist reports that artificial intelligence has “weaseled its way into an increasing number of digital travel agencies and navigation systems.” New features such as converting Instagram reels into travel plans and screenshots into personalized maps are popping up everywhere. These AI innovations are so advanced that the process of writing out our own vacation itineraries on a sheet of paper or even in a Google Doc has been rendered obsolete.

Priceline has a few new AI-powered tools, including a Trip Vibe Selector which helps you find the best neighborhoods to stay in based on the atmosphere you want. And Expedia recently launched a new AI tool called Trip Matching, where Instagram users can build an itinerary entirely out of reels and book it through Expedia. All you have to do is DM whatever Instagram reel gives you wanderlust to the Expedia Instagram account, and you’ll receive a full schedule with hotel recommendations, travel tips, and activity ideas.

If you thought these AI features were limited to travel booking websites, you’d be mistaken. Parks Project, an outdoor retail store that sells trendy t-shirts and camping gear, now has a virtual trip planner called Parks Guide. You can ask the tool for things like hiking trail recommendations, national park info, and what to pack for a trip.

Now, depending on your own travel style, this is either great news or a little worrying. But as WIRED’s Victoria Turk writes, the worst part of travel is often all the planning, “the faff of finding and booking transport, accommodation, restaurant reservations—the list can feel endless.” The latest wave of AI agents, such as OpenAI’s Operator and Anthropic’s Computer Use claim they can take these dreary, cumbersome tasks from befuddled travelers and do it all for you. But are they really that good at digging out the good stuff? She put these new AI travel agents to the test and was impressed with its ability to score deals, nab reservations and make workable itineraries.

“Imagine you have tasked a personal assistant with organizing a business trip from Europe to the U.S. During that interaction your assistant is able to understand that you absolutely must return home in time for your child’s birthday, that your trip will last for three nights, and you are free on Thursday evening when your favorite band happens to be playing in town,” travel consultant Jay Richmond told CNBC. Rather than returning a page of options generated by a search containing only dates and locations, these AI agents “can apply sentiment analysis and reasoning logic to offer recommendations that better meet the traveler’s needs.” Hey, what do you have to lose? Give it try.

U.K. and 27 Other Nations Condemn Israel

They said the war ‘must end now’ and denounced Israel’s aid delivery model in Gaza

Twenty-eight countries including Britain, Japan and a host of European nations issued a joint statement Monday saying the war in Gaza “must end now”—the latest sign of allies’ sharpening language as Israel’s isolation deepens. The nations slammed Israel for “drip feeding” aid into the Gaza Strip, as the health ministry in the territory said that more than 1,000 people have been killed seeking humanitarian relief there since late May.

The foreign ministers of countries also including Australia and Canada said “the suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths.” They condemned “the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.” The BBC reports that the statement described as “horrifying” the recent deaths of over 800 Palestinians who were seeking aid, according to the figures released by Gaza’s Health Ministry and the U.N. human rights office.

According to CNN, the Israel Defense Forces has acknowledged firing warning shots toward crowds in some instances, and denied responsibility for other incidents. In late June, the military said it had “reorganized” the approach routes to aid sites to minimize “friction with the population,” but the killings have continued.

Resisting Rent Algorithms

There's a growing push for cities to resist the technology

How do you calculate the best price for something? For a growing number of industries, the answer doesn’t involve a carefully maintained list of prices per product as much as it involves letting the algorithm loose. Airlines are experimenting with AI-generated airfares, and the retail equivalent of surge pricing has shown up at grocery stores. Can the real estate market be far behind? Short answer: No.

But federal, state and local regulators accuse rental-data algorithms such as RealPage and Yardi Systems of collecting and crunching confidential data to help landlords illegally collude on pricing. According to the Wall Street Journal, that was partly to blame for the double-digit rent surges of the pandemic era, they allege.

And some cities are already fighting it. Two of the most prominent cities in New Jersey, Hoboken and Jersey City, have taken steps to prohibit the use of algorithmically generated rates on rental properties. As NJ.com’s Stephanie Loder reports, this puts them in line with a number of other state and local governments around the country. Earlier this year, the New York State Legislature began debating a similar measure. InsideHook reports that Jersey City was the first city or town in the state to implement such a measure, which puts it in the company of San Francisco, Minneapolis and Philadelphia. One of the reasons these algorithmically generated rents are so contentious is because they use, as Loder puts it, “software and non-public data” in their calculations.

Earth Is Spinning Faster

In fact, it will make today the 2nd-shortest day in history

Time flies, right? And three days in July and August could zoom by faster than usual this year—but only if your clocks are set to official astronomical time. As the planet continues to rotate faster, the days become marginally shorter and it’s attracting the attention of scientists and timekeepers.

July 10 was the shortest day of the year so far, lasting 1.36 milliseconds less than 24 hours, according to data from the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service and the U.S. Naval Observatory, compiled by timeanddate.com. More exceptionally short days are coming on July 22 and August 5, currently predicted to be 1.34 and 1.25 milliseconds shorter than 24 hours, respectively.

As you might be aware, the speed of Earth’s rotation isn't fixed. Long ago, a day was much shorter than the 24 hours we're now accustomed to. According to a 2023 study, a day on Earth was approximately 19 hours for a significant part of Earth's early history, due to a balance between solar atmospheric tides and lunar ocean tides. Before the 1950s, the length of a day was defined by the Earth’s rotation and the apparent position of the sun. But now, officials keep track of time using atomic clocks, capable of measuring in nanoseconds (a billionth of a second), which are synchronised globally to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) so we get a much more accurate accounting of each day. These precise measurements matter when it comes to technology—computers, servers, GPS systems, banking and electricity networks, as well as large telescopes, which all rely on incredibly accurate synchronization, sometimes within a fraction of a billionth of a second.

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