[ExI] former deceased nfl players...

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sep 21, 2015 12:16 PM, "Adrian Tymes" <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sep 21, 2015 11:34 AM, "spike" <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> > Our current problem with Robot Olympics is that the bots are not
capable enough.  They are so slow it is boring to watch, even if one is
into that kind of thing.
>
> Right.  So, what about animatronic remote control drone football?  Would
that solve the problem, and would it introduce new problems that would
negatively affect the audience appeal?
>
> Emphasis on drone instead of full robot: full robot is not yet viable,
but could drone football provide the infrastructure (and some of the
funding) to make it viable?  Kind of like the Bolo and Ogre stories, where
AI awoke from autopilot routines trained by observing humans operating the
machines a lot.  Not that this would necessarily happen (neural nets could
be developed this way, though awakened sentience is far from guaranteed),
but once you have multiple football teams of human-like drone bodies built
and paid for, you can have a few spares to run cognition experiments in.
(Might an AI be friendlier if it thought of itself as essentially another
person, at least on a basic physical level, with similar ability to
directly modify the world?)
>
> > The advantage of humanoid robot football is that we already have the
infrastructure: we have ballfields and stadiums and such.
>
> And an audience already primed for this specific layout of
entertainment.  The average person can at least imagine a drone animatronic
body on the football field replacing a human body; it is a very small leap
from that to full teams of drones on both sides.
>
> If you want to pursue this idea, you will have to consider this angle a
lot.  Businesses like this have to be about providing customers with
something they want; even ad-supported businesses must provide something a
lot of people are willing to pay attention to.
>
> You're somewhere around Silicon Valley, right?  Can you try to chat up
someone in Levi's Stadium's management about what might be needed to make
animatronic drone football popular?
>
> The difficulty for you: you must NOT talk to them about robot, or
different-shape, or any such evolution of the concept (unless they suggest
it).  If you try that, you will fail hard.  Just animatronic drones.  That
will be as much of a leap as they can contemplate at first.  More
importantly, leaping beyond that means they can not bring in the audience
they know about, so they will not be able to help you.  Stick to
animatronic drones, with human pilots that could be current football
players with little drone-specific training.
>
> (It's perfectly okay to dream about where it might go, and nudge
development in that direction.  But if you want the money, you must stick
to steps that can be achieved with what's there today.  The trick is to do
so while improving what's there, so that after you succeed and are rich,
the infrastructure is there for you to take the next step.)

Thinking about it...a second difficulty may be "ask, don't tell".  Your
mission, should you choose to accept it, is to glean wisdom and insight
from them.  Obviously not on the technical side, but rather on the
logistics, marketing, and required capabilities (what limitations will the
drones have that people really care about, and what potential problems
exist that can be trivially solved using easily purchased technology).  At
least get from them a good list of questions that you could research, to
see how viable this idea might be.
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