ChatGPT for Digital Nomads
ChatGPT is in the process of disrupting our digital lives. How can digital nomads harness this new tool to make our lives better?
Disclaimer: This post was not written by ChatGPT. Let’s face it, if it was, it would probably be better :-)
In the last few weeks OpenAI has released GPT-4 to much fanfare, acclaim, and, let’s face it hype. But behind the breathless excitement is a serious step-change in the capabilities of AI to agument and assist human endeavours. If you want to see some of the things it can do, check out OpenAI’s developer demo.
So as a time-starved digital nomad, what can it do for you today and what will it be able to do in the near future?
Work faster and better
Casting my eyes around the local WeWork, it’s clear that a large number of people are already using ChatGPT to enhance the speed or the quality of their work. Many of us nomads spend our days tinkering away with computer code or other kinds of text. To anyone who’s played around with it, the use cases are obvious. We can do more work in less time (and therefore spend it doing things we want to do) as well as producing higher quality work.
As usage of the technology picks up, expectations of productivity will presumably increase. In the near-term however, I intend to take some of these time-savings and put them towards greater work-life-balance.
Language translation and learning
GPT-4 is an accomplished translator and is also able to explain the meaning and usage of particular words in many languages. Whilst this was already largely a solved problem with Google Translate or DeepL, ChatGPT brings us a one-stop shop for language related tasks. It’s therefore a great tool to carry on the road and pull out when you need to understand something in a foreign language.
OpenAI promises that multi-modal support (i.e. images) will be coming soon. This will allow us to take photos of signs or documents and ask ChatGPT to explain them to us. Unlike existing translation tools it will also be able to summarise things neatly for us and answer questions about the content we’ve given it.
Planning travel and trips
ChatGPT has huge potential for taking over some of the administrative burden of planning travel, trips and scheduling. Currently this is limited by its limited knowledge of the world - both due to its knowledge cut-off date as well as its propensity to hallucinate details. However, plugins are already available to allow it to search the web and interact with other external systems.
We’ll soon see these flourish into automated travel assistants which can keep track of your schedule, help you make planning decisions and book flights, hotels and airbnbs. Executive-assistant level travel planning for everyone!
Again here, ChatGPT will be able to read websites in the local language and answer questions such as “Find me a vegan restaurant in Tbilisi near to my hotel”.
Disconnecting
A big part of nomad-life, at least for me, is the opportunity to embed myself in a different place, and, at least for short periodsm disconnect.
You’ll soon be able to set ChatGPT up as a kind of uber-intelligent out-of-office system. Tell it the criteria for which it should forward important messages to you and get it to screens your emails and chat messages, only alerting you if something urgent has come up.
Or, if you want to stay up-to-date with what’s happened on Slack, ask it to collate messages and summarise anything important to your work in a single digest. You’ll be able to jump in and out of work without the slow re-integration of context induced by being out of contact for a few weeks.
I’ve heard a lot of people say that they’ve totally stopped reading news in the last year or so for the sake of their mental health. Here too, ChatGPT will give us tools to stay up-to-date with current affairs in a way that works for us. “Summarise the headlines from the last week with a good mixture of positive and negative stories. Please focus on these topics and try to avoid these ones.”
Staying in touch
Maybe this is a bit whackier but I can also see people setting up ChatGPT to send out summary messages or answer questions from friends and family. Where is Alex currently and what’s he upto? When’s Alex moving on to next and where’s he going?
Again looking into the crystal ball a bit, we should expect that ChatGPT will be capable of match-making people for both dating and socialising. “Find me people who love programming and craft beer in this city and see if they fancy grabbing a pint”.
What’s next
We’ve already seen the power ChatGPT can bring to everyday problems in work and life. Personally, I’ve already signed up for ChatGPT Plus and use it daily to speed up my work.
Obviously this is something of an optimistic take (you have to have some optimism I feel to be a digital nomad in the first place). GPT-4 and other large language models are likely to bring fairly serious disruption to our economies and certainly have potential to both improve and worsen individual lives.
However, I think there’s good reason to be excited about the potential of large language models to automate some of the trickier bits of nomad life. I’m also convinced that products will emerge that help us to spend less time online and more in the time and space of the place we’ve travelled to (incidentally if anyone is interested in building tools like this, get in touch!).