The Web3 + AI Daily: On Agentic Travel Payments, and Microsoft's Soft Power

Travala, AWS, and Coinbase enabling autonomous agents to book and pay for your trips, and Microsoft launching an AI-focused magazine.

Image generated using Ideogram.ai

Hello, everyone, and welcome to all newly joined subscribers!

This is the 85th edition of The Web3 + AI Daily - your definitive guide to the intersection of blockchain and AI.

Thank you for being here! Let’s dive in.

---

What’s Hot in Web3 + AI?

Agents Can Now Book and Pay for Trips Autonomously

Travala, a crypto-native and agentic travel booking service, has partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and integrated its AgentCore payment infrastructure to power stablecoin booking payments.

The Travala Travel MCP, introduced in June, is an agentic AI travel protocol that allows AI agents to search, book, and pay for trips autonomously onchain. Built on the Base Layer 2 blockchain and utilising the x402 protocol, travellers can book and manage trips conversationally in Claude. Developers can integrate the Travala Travel MCP into their AI agents and receive a 10% cbBTC (Coinbase Wrapped Bitcoin) rebate on every successful booking.

For context, “Amazon Bedrock AgentCore is AWS’s flagship managed runtime for production AI agents, making it the default choice for enterprises building on AWS.” Here’s Amazon‘s reasoning for launching it:

Today, agents are doing a great job at reasoning, choosing tools, and completing tasks, but they hit a roadblock when payment is involved. To address this, we launched AgentCore payments in collaboration with Coinbase and Stripe in preview in May, enabling agent developers to equip their agents to autonomously pay for paid APIs, MCPs, and content with a few lines of code. Today, we are happy to announce that this service is generally available, enabling enterprises to power agentic payments with security, guardrails, and observability for production workloads.

By integrating its agentic booking workflows with AWS’s enterprise-grade security and AgentCore’s identity and wallet infrastructure, Travala empowers customers to safely outsource travel planning, booking, and payments to AI agents.

---

Web3 + AI Readings & Conversations

The Humanist Review of AI

Did you hear that Microsoft launched an AI-focused magazine? I find this quite an interesting move. While its competitors on the AI scene, OpenAI and Anthropic, are getting ahead by cozying up to the U.S. government and making headlines with stories about AI going rogue, Microsoft is taking a distinctly softer-power approach.

The first issue of The Humanist Review of AI was published on July 15th, with a forward by Mustafa Suleyman. His tendency to anthropomorphize AI aside, (check my review of his book ‘The Coming Wave’ here), Suleyman’s manifesto attempts, or at least appears to, to bring a diverse range of voices into the conversation around AI and broaden the set of stakeholders shaping the future of intelligence.

I commissioned this journal because the AI conversation isn’t working. There’s a lot of noise, and everyone is talking past each other. Researchers talk to researchers. Artists talk to artists. Economists talk to economists. Progress and mutual understanding is stalling. There are few places where disparate ideas converge and cross-pollinate. At the same time, many people feel like AI is happening to them, not with them, or indeed for them. It feels to many like a murky, distant revolution without much of a chance to steer or respond to it.

I hope The Humanist Review of AI helps to widen the conversation and offer a critical window into what is undoubtedly the biggest transformation of our time.

The magazine strives to give writers, scientists, thinkers, and builders a platform to share their perspectives on AI and visions for the future of humanity in the AI era. The essays featured in the first issues reflected on concepts like consciousness, personhood, reason, and soul, and how AI prompts us to rethink and rediscover them. They also touched on human rights, markets, and democracy, and, of course, the nature of intelligence itself.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s professor and The Nobel Prize laureate Daron Acemoglu insists that we urgently change the conversation around AI and the direction in which the technology is headed. He argues that we should not aim for AI to replace workers, but rather to make them better at their job. I recommend his essay.

Worse, on the current trajectory, AI will be nowhere as beneficial as the industry insiders expect. We may be on the verge of squandering the tremendous potential of artificial intelligence, because we are not conceptualizing it the right way, and we are not developing it the right way.

Under the banner of AGI, all major AI developers are putting their effort into getting AI to mimic human skills. A more productive path would be to recognize that AI should work alongside humans, not replace them.

The first and most important step is to change the conversation away from AGI and toward the pro-worker possibilities; away from doomsday scenarios of human extinction and toward the real and present danger that on our current path we will likely amplify inequalities, contribute to massive job losses and not even get the promised productivity benefits.

Audrey Tang discusses how to protect humanism and truth, and how to build a public-interest and democracy-affirming AI. Tang emphasizes that AI can amplify conflict in our digital interactions just as well as it can lower toxicity:

The central pathology of the last decade online was not the abundance of speech. It was the extraction of attention through ranking.

But AI can also be used to counter that logic. It can annotate before outrage calcifies. It can translate between communities where moral languages differ even when practical hopes overlap. It can help surface common questions before conflict is misdescribed as civilizational incompatibility. It can summarize a thread before people post and take sides. It can help a person respond to hostility without having to metabolize every insult first.

The first issue also welcomed articles by Nick Cave, Alain de Botton, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and many others. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about them, so don’t hesitate to share.

---

Thank you for reading! I hope you found this article insightful.

If you’d like to keep up with the latest developments at the burgeoning intersection of blockchain and AI, I invite you to subscribe.

And if you find value in my writing, consider supporting the newsletter. I’d greatly appreciate it.

The Web3 + AI Book Club is live on Fable. We’re currently reading Karen Hao’s ‘Empire of AI.’ Follow the link below and come join our literary community.

I'm looking forward to connecting with fellow Crypto x AI enthusiasts, so don't hesitate to share your thoughts here or reach out on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Firefly.social.

---

Disclaimer: The content of this newsletter is provided for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing contained herein should be construed as financial advice or as a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any of the companies or assets mentioned.

Please don’t take my views at face value. Instead, do your own research (DYOR), think critically, and share your perspective so we can challenge ideas, learn from one another, and arrive at better conclusions through thoughtful discussion.