alt Hacker NewsI think you underestimate just how much we value human achievement.
Why do we watch Olympic runners, when cars on your average city street easily exceed Usain Bolt's top speed on their morning drive to Starbucks? Why do we watch the Tour de France, when we can watch Uber Eats drivers on their 150cc scooters easily outpace top cyclists? I'm sure within a couple years a Boston Dynamics robot will be able to out-gymnast Simone Biles or out-skate Surya Bonaly. Would anyone watch these robots in competition? I doubt it. We watch Bolt, Biles, and Bonaly compete because their performance represents a profound confluence of human effort and talent. It is a celebration of human achievement, even though that achievement objectively pales in comparison to what our machines can accomplish.
I think the same is true for other aspects of human creativity and labor. As we are able to automate more and more, we will place increasing importance on what inherently cannot be automated: celebration of our fellow humanity. Another poster wrote that "bullshit jobs" [0] exist primarily because we value human contact [1]. I am inclined to agree.
Replies
> Why do we watch Olympic runners, when cars on your average city street easily exceed Usain Bolt's top speed on their morning drive to Starbucks? Why do we watch the Tour de France, when we can watch Uber Eats drivers on their 150cc scooters easily outpace top cyclists? I'm sure within a couple years a Boston Dynamics robot will be able to out-gymnast Simone Biles or out-skate Surya Bonaly.
Big sports events are the "circenses" part of "panem et circenses" [1]. Fun fact concerning this: the German word for "entertainment" is "Unterhaltung"; thus it can be argued that the purpose of entertainment/Unterhaltung is "unten halten" (to keep at the bottom), i.e. to keep the mass of the populace at the bottom, or in other words: to prevent the mass of the populace from coming up.
> Would anyone watch these robots in competition?
I have seen robot fight competitions both live and in videos, and I have to admit that these are not boring to watch.
So yes, with a proper marketing I can easily imagine that lots of people would love to see broadcasts of some robot competitions.
--
People do watch F1 and Nascar though, and those get more viewers than running or cycling typically.
All of those sports make intuitive sense to me, I really don't get why we make such a big thing of balls though.
Ironic seeing as how we canceled the Olympics during the world wars instead of the other way around.
So us lucky survivors can take heart in the fact that we may still be able to perform for the ultra-rich as gladiators?
And yet there are orders of magnitude more cars than olympic athletes, and most olympic athletes struggle to make much money on it.
So, sure, there will be space for some human achievement for the sake of it, but, most fewer and fewer people will make a living off that.
> "bullshit jobs" [0] exist primarily because we value human contact
They are not "bullshit jobs"
They will become so only after the day when AI "help" and "support" is actually better than talking to a human.
Which is not happening anytime soon, possibly never. Call me when it happens
Sucks for us that don't care one iota about sports, but care about the arts.
Chess is a good example.
When chess engines started becoming really good, some people worried that competitive chess would die. Today, grandmasters stand no chance against a smartphone, and yet, chess popularity is at an all time high.