Athletic Excellence
... the last bastion of human greatness in an age of machines
Hey Everyone! 👋
Happy Sunday and welcome back to The Gunn Show. Hope you all had a fantastic week as always.
It was a busy one on our end per usual, with our now normal mixture of work, baby, and house items all at once. A co-worker summed up my feelings well this week, saying “wow, you really just decided to go full on ‘adult’ all at once, huh?” Touché.
Nevertheless, it was a good one with plenty of highlights including an ultrasound (still amazing every time), our first items moved into our new house, and a Vols victory over Mississippi State on Saturday. Like the Big Orange, we’ll be looking to build off our momentum from this week into next as Friday marks the official move date to our new place. Fingers crossed for a smooth experience and an installed TV by 7pm on Saturday for UT vs. Georgia.
Now - let’s get on to this week’s edition, which centers around a topic I’ve written about before: the role sports will come to play in an increasingly digitized age. Today’s piece takes a slightly different lens than prior, looking at through the lens of something that machines - and thus AI - can’t replicate: human biology.
Hope you enjoy, and see you next week!
- CG
On Athletic Excellence - The Last Bastion of Human Greatness
This week, I came across something that got my brain churning.
The moment of inspiration came after reading Sahil Bloom’s weekly newsletter The Curiosity Chronicle, in which he shared an idea he recently captured following a conversation with actor/musician Josh Radnor. The construct of their back and forth was centered around the future of human creativity in the AI space, specifically as it relates to the concept of ‘greatness’. He described the encounter as such (emphasis mine):
I recently spent time with Josh Radnor, an actor and musician who shared some brilliant thoughts on the future of AI in the creative space. He referenced a friend who had said that AI will write a lot of good songs, but will never write a great song. The reason: Greatness is a uniquely human idea. It is about pushing the upper limits of human possibility.
That idea - that greatness is uniquely human - helped crystallize some thoughts and got me thinking more about the role that sports will play in the coming years.
This is a topic I discussed in depth in my article The Sports Singularity, where I shared on my belief that sports are uniquely positioned to serve a powerful role in an increasingly automated and digitized world. At the core of this conviction is the idea that sports capture something unique about what it means to be human that AI and similar technologies do not: they are real experiences. I described that sentiment as the following:
For as long as it has existed, sport has revolved around real people in real places, the great desire for human competition played out in real life…... That is always what has made sport so - and nothing about the world and technology will ever change that.
[And so], instead of placing our bets on what will change, for sport we need to place them on what shouldn’t - namely, that they should serve as one of the last - and best - bastions for human experience. They should continue to pull at the same emotional strings they have for millennia - the desire for competition, for connection, for excitement, for passion……. Because the more we live our lives with a screen, the more we will come to yearn for the things that represent the real.
Overall, my feelings can be summed up as the following: in an era of increasingly non-human things, I have a growing conviction that people will develop strong attachments to the things that are human. And sports is at the top of that list.
The idea of greatness as a uniquely human trait adds an interesting bent to this perspective, one that only makes me more convicted in the power the institution of sport will carry into the future. Why? Because I believe there is a strong argument to be made that athletic excellence is one of the best encapsulations of human excellence possible, if only for a simple reason: sports tap into one of the most fundamental aspects of human life, something that machines have no hope of replicating: our biology.
If you zoom out and take a big picture perspective of what athletics are, it is hard to see them as anything other than a public display of human biology. At its core, the story of athleticism is one of biological coordination - the result of muscles, tendons, organs, and other human systems all working together synergistically in order to accomplish the feat of movement. The best athletes are the ones that harness this process most effectively, pooling the resources of their physical and mental systems together in order to accomplish feats that other humans can only dream of. It is this, more than anything, that keeps us tuned into sports - we want to see athletic greatness because it redefines our expectations of what humans are capable of, giving us all something to aspire to in the process.
I’m of the belief that now, more than ever, we are fully equipped to appreciate athletic greatness in all its splendor - if only because of the ways in which technology is now plugged into sports. Because while the games themselves have barely changed over the years (outside of pitch clocks and some weird kick off rules….), the same cannot be said for our ability to objectify - and thus evaluate - the performances happening within them.
Let me explain why.
I’m old enough to remember the early days of ESPN’s Sports Science segments, in which host John Brenkus would give perspective-setting breakdowns on the most exceptional athletic feats from across sports - things like Usain Bolt’s sprint speed, Dwight Howard’s reach, and more. By way of advanced technologies like motion-capture systems, high speed cameras, and computer-generated imagery, the show did an amazing job of peeling back the various layers that make up the ‘how’ behind the world’s greatest athletes. I remember thinking at the time how cool those segments were because of how the specificity of the science gave you an appreciation for what made certain athletes unique; what truly made them great.
Back in the early 2000s when the show first started, there were few things like it in the public domain. The secrets of the world’s greatest athletes remained largely hidden from view, confined to obscure research labs far out of the public eye.
But times have since changed. The modern era is now one where we can track everything from the elbow extension velocity of a baseball pitcher to the precise GPS location of a football, and virtually everything in between. The key, however, is not that that data now exists so much that it is now overwhelmingly public, hosted on various sites like Baseball Savant or displayed on your television screen during your weekly installment of Sunday Night Football. The result has been something akin to a democratization of Brenkus’s sports science superpowers, such that anyone with an internet connection can now study the science of the skills behind the world’s best athletes. Put simply, now more than ever we are able to understand what truly makes great athletes great.
This quantification of excellence is nothing new to sports, per se, as we’ve been doing it with statistics as a proxy for centuries. Wins and losses, homers and steals - all aggregate measures we use to help contextualize greatness and help us formulate an answer to the questions of Jordan or LeBron, Tiger or Jack. And yet, regardless of the nature of your favorite water-cooler debate, there is one commonality underlying them all: we are seeking to ascribe a winner to the game of athletic, and thus human, excellence. Because at the end of the day, we humans have a fundamental need to believe in the capacity for human excellence - and there are few things in the world that capture this idea quite like sports.
And so, in a world where there will be an increasing amount of machine excellence, I’m willing to make a bet that people will be increasingly attached to finding examples of human excellence.
Why? Because in a highly automated world, human greatness is a feature and not a bug. As I’ve written about many times before, the most valuable point of differentiation in this new world will lie in the skills that distinguish humans from machines. And while there are increasing amounts of our mental attributes that companies and builders are attempting to turn over to machines, I think the physical ones are likely to be the last frontier.
Look at even the most physically advanced machines in the world (like Spot and Sparkles from Boston Dynamics), and you can’t help but thinking that there is something missing. Sure, it may be surprising - or even impressive - to see what these machines are now capable of relative to the past, but when compared to humans we all know it’s not quite the same, a case of apples to oranges. Machines will never possess the marvels of biology that make humans (and any other living beings) special. And as such, they will fail to provide humanity with a stick with which to measure the greatness of the human form.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe in the year 3000 machines will have become so advanced that humans will fill 100,000-seat stadiums to watch them play 11 on 11 between some white lines. If that day comes and I’m here to see it, maybe I’ll even buy a ticket myself (and hope that they’ve automated the refs by that point too….).
But I doubt it.
Because after all, if athletics are representative of the biological excellence that is fundamental to humans alone, machines are behind from the start.
It’s 7-0 good guys, and we are out to an early lead. I’d bet the score is only getting run up from here.
