Where are we going?

Roborace, a motorsports company that plans to showcase driverless car races, recently unveiled its self-driving car that resembles a “crouching insect, ready to leap.” Anyone who knows me well would tell you that I could care less about auto racing, but this article made me wonder. Will robots, controlled by AI, one day replace humans in our most widely-viewed sports?

Take football. This past season, the NFL’s overall regular and post season ratings were down 9% and 6%, respectively. The exact reason for the ratings drop is hotly debated, but concussions suffered by players are often cited as one of the main reasons fans have lost interest in tuning in on Sundays. The NFL has reacted by implementing rules to reduce the risk of head injuries, but at some point, it will cease to resemble the game that fans once loved.

Cue the robots. Imagine next Sunday during football season, you tune into a game that is faster and more violent than any game you’ve watched before. The players make vicious tackles with no regard for their bodies. The action is non-stop, never breaking for commercial since players won’t need time to recover. Games would be played more than once a week since players don’t run the risk of being injured. The only difference is that players wearing the helmet and pads aren’t human. Would you really care?

What the future of sports will look like is anyone’s guess, but it might just be human-less.

Awesome, not awesome.

#Awesome

“We believe that the rapid adoption of AI by enterprises is essential to their success. AI is as profound in its implications as electricity, and just as one cannot imagine a business deciding not to use not electricity or taking a “wait and see” attitude about it, companies that don’t rethink every department on their org chart in light of this new technology are at risk at being displaced by their more agile competitors.” — Byron Reese, Writer. Learn More on Gigaom >

#Not Awesome

“Not only are [future robots] more intelligent than us, but more ethical. Imagine a robot police officer that never racially profiles and a robot judge that take fairness to its zenith. Imagine an elder-care robot that never allows grandpa to feel neglected or a friend who never tires of listening to your complaints. With their big brains and even bigger hearts, such robots could solve all the world’s problems while we stare at our belly buttons. Where does that future leave us? Who are we if robots surpass us in every respect? What, then, are humans even for?” — Coby McDonald, Writer. Learn More on California Magazine >

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What we’re reading.

1/ Artificial intelligence in the workplace will require that job roles become more fluid, so companies are starting to emphasize the importance of cultural fit and adaptability in their hiring processes.

2/ Netflix is using a new machine learning technique to compress video without reducing quality so that you’ll never get interrupted mid-binge again.

3/ A man sick of trying to remember what to pick up from the grocery store hacks together a system that recognizes what in his fridge needs to be replaced, and has Amazon order it for him.

4/ Using Tesla’s self-driving mode sounds pretty horrifying when you’re flying down the highway and it thinks it’s spotted a bridge that needs to be avoided.

5/ Self-driving cars may not solve institutional racism, but they will give police officers less reason to arbitrarily pull over minority drivers.

6/ Physicists are using a new machine learning method to spot and make sense of distant galaxies that not even the most powerful telescopes can spot.

7/ One day, your car will drive you to work as you sit back and read on your phone, but first a company needs to make a detailed map that shows millions of miles of road with the precise location of every stop sign, all the lane markings, every exit ramp and every traffic light.

Links from the community.

“Transportation is about to hit exponential changes unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.” written by Dillon Adam Kell (@adamhkell). Learn More on freeCodeCamp >

“Machine Learning: An In-Depth Guide — Overview, Goals, Learning Types, and Algorithms” submitted by Alex Castrounis (@innoarchitech). Learn More on Innoarchitech >

“Creating art with deep neural networks” submitted by Dillon Erb (@dlnrb). Learn More on Paperspace >

“Three things you need to know about machine learning” submitted by Medha Agarwal (@mkhandel). Learn More on Medium >

“Facebook Is Using Artificial Intelligence To Help Prevent Suicide” submitted by Ben Krasnow (@bckrasnow). Learn More on BuzzFeed >

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