Gemini Spark is the most impressive and terrifying AI experience I’ve had yet

According to every product demo from the last four years, planning a trip is a killer use case for AI. Just tell it where you’re going, they all promise, and your chatbot / agent / other buzzword will exhaustively search travel options, read up on all the fun things to do, check all the local hotspots, and offer you a fully fledged itinerary. So far, I’ve found this to work only in the most generic ways: If you want to do the six most obvious things in any city on planet Earth, AI has you covered, but that’s about as far as it goes. I had a very different experience using Spark, Google’s new always-on AI agent . Spark is a hugely ambitious thing : Google intends it to be the interface through which you can use external apps, and over time even operate your computer. (“OpenClaw with better internet access” is a not-wrong way to describe it.) Spark is currently rolling out to Google’s $99 / month AI Ultra plan, but Google allowed me to try it early. I tested some simple action-oriented stuff, like having Spark go through my Gmail inbox and suggest a bunch of things I should unsubscribe from and having it comb my Google Docs for old tasks I still haven’t finished. In both cases, it did a fine job, even creating me a nicely organized document with a bunch of links to quickly unsubscribe from various marketing emails. Then I gave Spark a simple trip-planning job. “I’m going to be in Hershey PA with my wife, two kids, and dog the weekend of July 18th. …