Maarlab, the digital manager from the Canary Islands born with the mission of rethinking tourism, showed what tourism could be like in the year 2067. Hiperstición is a short film that recounts the journey to a possible reality in which technology coexists with nature for the sake of achieve a better coexistence. A place where virtual tourism reigns, just as Schwarzenegger traveled in Total Recall, making the limits between the physical and the digital disappear and thus transforming the tourist experience.
“A horizon that is closer than it seems and that must be seen as an opportunity to expand the limits of our industry,” predicted Raúl Domínguez, CEO of Maarlab in Futurismo. It is also a place where biotechnology is capable of creating hotels on infrastructures capable of producing energy, oxygen and water through natural processes, but also preventing, controlling and turning off fires.
In this tourism of the future “we have managed to become a tourism innovation hub that attracts the best world talent, a part of the planet where transhumanists They coexist with digitized tourism in a more prosperous and sustainable destination from a triple dimension: environmental, economic and social”.
And all this, told in a story imagined, written and designed by artificial intelligences over the last few weeks.
Because the time has come. The future of tourism is no longer just the property of the human being. The entry of artificial intelligence has changed the fate of the industry by adding to the equation an ally that neither rests nor has limits. “This does not mean that artificial intelligence has arrived to take our jobs away,” said Raúl Domínguez during his speech at Futurismo 2023, together with Terry Mederos, director of innovation at Turismo de Tenerife. «If we want the future of tourism in Canary Islands be truly sustainable for all of us, we must be able to enhance our capacities using new technologies, and today we show how an idea can end up becoming its own reality”.
At a time when people are constantly talking about the arrival of AI to all types of users, Domínguez explained that it is not enough to just write in tools like ChatGPT or MidJourney, “the true potential lies in achieving easily replicable dynamics among work and AIs; it is our opinions, emotions and requests that really drive the AI to get where we want to go,” she said. Because Hyperstition means that: “Working together with technology to make possible the future we dream of for the destination.”
This is how it has been used to create this animated short. The key has not been in the employment of artificial intelligences, but in a humanistic way of seeing technology; a way in which the creative team of Flecher.co, the agency that has produced it, has used the tools – script, images, music and even voice-over – through a complicated journey and, at the same time , exciting of which more can be discovered in the coming days through the Maarlab networks.
A work from which several interesting questions are extracted: Will it be possible to travel with avatars to avoid the deterioration of nature? Is a completely self-sufficient destination in which hotels are capable of regenerating the natural space they occupy viable? Wich is the way to go?
For Raúl Domínguez, one thing is clear: «If we want a sustainable future, the strategy must revolve around the convergence between the public and the private, between governance instruments and business talent, a common space where co-governance over the spaces, innovation projects and talent are part of the same path”. The CEO of Maarlab concludes: “That is why we have come to Futurismo 2023. Because the more people we imagine a better future, the more possibilities we will have to make it a reality.”
