Bringing computers into sports (BCIs)
Technology and sports have always gone hand in hand. From better and more advanced equipment to better cameras 🎥 to review the game and track every shot each player makes. These advancements have pushed sports forward, but with all these new evolving technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Brain Controlled interfaces (BCIs), the world of sport could be changed drastically from the way we know it today.
Pl(Ai)ing with AI 🧠
AI has many features in today's world from education to medicine, AI can be used for many crazy things. Currently, AI is being used for training athletes to maximize their potential. For example, when athletes are weight training, AI can provide real-time feedback to help make sure that the athletes are getting the most out of their workout 🏋️♂️ and to ensure they aren’t getting hurt. Also, they can also design specific work out regiments for athletes that busy coaches may not be able to provide for every player.
Now, where can we go with AI in the future? Well, one idea that I had in mind was replacing the home-plate umpire with AI. To clarify, the home-plate umpire calls balls, strikes, and foul balls in the greatest American pastime, baseball. ⚾️
The calls he makes can change the game drastically and after watching game 5 of the MLB world series in Washington, we can see that the umpire can make mistakes. Now, even if the umpire wasn’t the deciding factor in the 7–1 Nationals loss, an unreliable strike zone could make the difference in other games.
With AI, we could teach a computer what the strike zone looks like and have a consistent strike zone using the multiple cameras already in the position to capture all the angles and teaching computers what a strike, a ball, and a foul ball looks like.
New technology could revolutionize the game and make sure that the victory isn’t due to bad reffing. Using AI in a situation like this could also relate to other sports such as hockey, teaching a computer what a goal looks like and having the goal light turn on when it passes the goal line. Or, in football 🏈, when the player crosses the plane for a touchdown, we can program AI to back up the ref’s call on the field to ensure that it is the right call.
Brain-control integration of sports (BCIs) 🧠🦾
How many abbreviations can I make up for BCIs you ask, well it’s a lot. For those who don’t know, the most common abbreviation for BCIs is brain-computer interfaces. This is the technology that allows you to control other objects with your brain. It’s basically giving you professor X superpowers for controlling different objects.
This new technology uses our brain waves to allow us to control things like prosthetic limbs 🦾, toys ♟, and even cars 🚗. The possibilities using this type of technology is endless but BCIs haven’t been incorporated into sports all that much. My idea for a new sport is BCI controlled race car driving.
Racecar driving is considered as an extreme sport to most and can be extremely dangerous as you have to travel at speeds over 180 miles per hour. 🏎️ At that rate, you would be able to cross the length of Florida in about 2.5 hours, which would normally take 7–8 hours.
As a result of this, there have been over 520 racecar related deaths in the past 25 years. Having BCI controlled racecars would allow for race car driving to be a lot safer and it could bring more people into the sport of race car driving. This idea may seem impossible, but recently a company in China was able to build a brain-controlled car so, this idea could very much become a reality sooner rather than later.
Another idea that I had, was BCI controlled boxing 🥊. Boxing similar to racecar driving is an extremely dangerous sport and can result in plenty of injuries. Most injuries are physical with broken bones or damaged eyesight, but a lot of unnoticed injuries from boxing are mental and have a lifelong impact on the individual. So, to reduce injury, we could have robots in the ring and have the controllers 🎮 on the outside. This could test the limits of the human mind as it would be more a sport of strategy and stong mindedness rather than physical strength and brute force.
BCIs could be the future of sports and could bring a new side to the sporting. Whether or not they would still be considered as sports is up for debate but we could always figure that out later, or battle it out in the ring with BCIs.
The Sports Terminator
Robotics have been seen in sports before, from the Ping Pong 🏓 playing robot to the robots that play soccer, it’s been done. However, this technology leads to new changes in the sporting community. It could be a new battle in the Man vs Machine war. Machines like the Forpheus, from Omron, have mastered the art of ping pong and can demolish almost anyone in a game of table tennis. If we already have machines like this, what is stopping them from making more machines that humans can play against?
The answer is, there isn’t. Nothing is stopping us from making more robot sports masters. What if we could supersize this and make a tennis-playing robot or even a basketball-playing robot. This could bring a new aspect to the game and bring new competition that we have literally never seen before.
Additionally, these robots could help improve training as things like the ping pong robot help to tell you how you can improve your game and what you can change to make your returns better based on what the pros do. These robots could to make some of the best athletes in the world and provide better training than most coaches in the world. Then, combine this with AI 🧠 and some training, and a robot could be one of the best athletes or athlete coaches in the world.
All in all, the possibilities of sports and technology are endless and with our current access to technology, anything is possible. Maybe the new Stephen Curry or Lionel Messi could be a machine or trained by one. Only time will tell.
Key Take-aways
- There is so much potential for technology in sports that haven’t been explored
- Combining technology like AI with BCIs or AI with robotics opens more doors for innovation and possibilities
- New sports could come from technology + sports like my idea of BCI controlled race car driving
- Brings a new battlefield for the Man vs Machine war
