[ExI] Driverless racecars

[Anders Sandberg]

Dave Sill <sparge at gmail.com> , 15/2/2015 4:43 PM:


On Sun, Feb 15, 2015 at 7:29 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
Making the cars driverless seems to be the next step.

No doubt that idea has appeal, but the fundamental draw of athletics is the performance of the athletes. What can the best humans on the planet do?



I remember debating human enhancement in sport a few years ago, when Soren Holm made roughly the same point: we watch sport because we like to see humans do awesome things. He was sceptical that we would enjoy seeing technological systems compete. Then I brought up monster truck rallys. 


I think what we want to see is *someone* excelling, but not necessarily in the form of a direct brain-muscle-motion connection: we are happy if it is remote as long as there are ingenuity and creativity going on. The Kasparov-Deep Blue chess match was interesting even though one participant was mindless, and Kasparov did think one move was truly creative. Maybe a sufficiently complex resource allocation and drive system might be interesting to watch too - especially since we can change the rules for Formula Something to make it interesting. After all, Formula One changes rules and technical limitations constantly to keep it watchable.





Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
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