As
has been discussed previously in this column, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has
become quite successful in defeating human players in games like chess and Go
as well as in video games. Now seventeen
members of the Toyota Engineering society have built an athletic robot from
scratch. None of these engineers had any
experience building robots, and they all learned from materials they got off
the Internet. Their robot is named CUE
and after 200,000 repetitions, it can now shoot free throws with nearly 100%
accuracy. It’s six feet three inches and
can make shots up to twelve feet from the basket. Its skills are definitely better than those
of the Japanese team Arvalq Tokyo, a team that is in the best basketball league
in Japan. And the robot’s free-throw
average is better than the best free-throw shooter in the NBA: Stephen
Curry. The one drawback is that CUE is
presently bolted to a platform and can’t move around the court. But we can be sure that with the right
resolve, that obstacle can be overcome.
And then CUE will be playing a normal game with all the humans. Or more accurately, a supernormal game,
because a mobile CUE will put human players to shame. The real question is why would people be
motivated to psychologically undermine the human race through robots like these. In physical games, humans would no longer be
the winning complex behavioral entities.
Robot
basketball players don’t fall into the traditional categories of purposes for
modern technology. They don’t make our
practical life tasks more frictionless or more efficient. And they are so much better than human
basketball players in shooting short-range baskets that they don’t even create
a situation with meaningful friction where players can find meaningful
competition. The superiority of these
basketbots is crushingly obvious. There
is no surprise when the basketbot makes a free-throw. We know what will happen. It will make the shot. And in the process of doing this, it
trivializes the capacities of really good human free-throw shooters. It takes away a lot of the meaning of
creating records through extraordinary human performances. People won’t pay as much attention to what
humans can do, if and when robots can do it much better. As a result human basketball players lose the
opportunity to make and preserve meaningful imprints and thus to use their
profession to create records that are remembered and that contribute to a
personal surrogate immortality for the good players.
It
also takes away the excitement for the fans who identify with the really good
players and mentally participate in the imprints that these players make and
preserve. Many fans live ordinary lives
and have little opportunity to make and preserve organic meaningful imprints in
their own daily lives. So they
compensate for this lack by vicariously participating with the players. The fans participate in the rich vibrant
experiences of the players making imprints.
And they participate in the collective surrogate immortality to which
the player contributes when he makes an unusual play and/or sets a new record.
And
the idea of a basketbot has the potential to totally disrupt the significance
placed in great play by human basketball players. Another disruption of the human narrative as
a whole. So again why do certain
engineers feel it necessary to work on a project like this that has such
potentially negative consequences?
Perhaps it relates to the experiential effects of all the sensory
distortion they have lived with growing up in a modern technological
society. We have talked about the
harmful effects of the understimulation from the experiential vacuum humans
have tried to create and the overstimulation from the waste products such as
overcrowding, acceleration of life including speeding vehicles, noise
pollution, air pollution, and light pollution from flashing lights. In more recent articles, I have focused more
on the understimulation of the experiential vacuum, because the overstimulation
is so much more apparent and so much has been written about it. The experiential vacuum has subtle but
powerful effects, and it makes people numb.
There are some people who live more readily in their minds, who may be
more affected by isolation from an organic living environment, because they
don’t naturally produce as many organic stimuli themselves for their own whole
physical beings. I would submit that
many people who become engineers would fall into this category, that they
particularly would have difficulty making and preserving organic imprints in a
living environment relatively bereft of external world organic stimuli. And they would feel acutely important in
their capacity to make imprints of some sort that could be preserved and be
part of a personal surrogate immortality.
Building
a robot is a way of sidestepping this sense of importance by making an alternate
complex behavioral entity that is not affected by numbness and that is capable
of carrying on a surrogate narrative, making and preserving surrogate imprints,
all of which contribute to an alternate surrogate immortality. This is what particularly motivates engineers
to build athlete robots. But to a lesser
extent, it is what motivates average citizens to watch them play. There is so much technology that does tasks
that people used to do with direct engagement with tools and materials and in
direct communion with a more natural environment. There is less and less that gives people a
sense of control a dominance over the phenomena in their external world. And because people are already predisposed to
blurring together with the technology that surrounds them, as a result of the
mirroring and modeling that consumer technology in particular provides, a
basketbot that shoots baskets with superhuman excellence is a perfect object
for identification. In other words, on a
certain level, the member of the audience becomes the super human robot, which
becomes a form of compensation for the sense of numbing impotence in the
general sweep of his daily life.
All
of us are affected to some extent by technology-based numbness, so it is nice
for us to be able to use a technological device, like a basketbot, to at least
mentally overcompensate and pull oneself into a temporary tension-pocket
emotional rush, as we watch a basketbot perform certain basketball skills even
better than the best human players.
Unfortunately, the basketbot is still another temptation to live
vicariously. There is a short rush from
watching the basketbot, and then there is the down from relying that another
technological entity has demonstrated still another prowess that represents an
improvement on what humans can do.
We
try to blur together with the basketbot, to become the basketbot, or some other
complex machine or robot that performs a recreational activity with superhuman
ability. But it proves to be only a
temporary escape. It does not address
the central problem of a growing numbness and a growing sense of impotence; as
modern technology takes over more and more not only of our daily practical
tasks, but more and more of our daily recreational activities. Less and less is left for us to do. Will we be seeing basketbots on professional
basketball teams? Not yet because the
basketbots are still on fixed bases. But
in the future, there is no reason to believe that mobile basketbots won’t
appear. And another area of human activity
that makes a significant contribution to the human narrative will be diminished
or eliminated as a result of modern technology.
© 2018 Laurence Mesirow
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