8/15/08: Tech has us sprinting to new kind of sports

I’ve been reading predictions lately, mostly by Ray Kurzweil, award-winning futurist, inventor and author.

Kurzweil has made amazingly accurate predictions about the past two decades, making his current theories all the more disturbing. Most recently, he published a book titled The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Coined by Vernor Vinge, the term "singularity" refers to a time when we will be able to reverse-engineer our brains using new technology, making us more or less immortal.

I’m hoping Kurzweil is wrong, and I could write a month’s worth of columns explaining why.
But Kurzweil’s thoughts on the future, and their implications for the way we think about our bodies, death and technology, sent my thoughts spinning in an unexpected direction: toward sports.

Other than medicine, professional sports is the one private-sector area in which I would expect the physical advantages of Kurzweil’s nanotechnology to hold intrinsic appeal. Pro athletes, or amateur athletes such as those we’re seeing in the Olympics these weeks, would have the most to gain from stamina- or power-enhancing augmentations of human biology.

We’ve seen some willingness to do whatever it takes to win with steroid-use scandals cropping up in professional athletics and past Olympics.

But we’ve also seen an outcry against steroids, which are dangerous, but which more relevantly violate the spirit (and law) of sporting events.

On the other hand, athletic gear enhanced by nanotechnology has been praised for everything from making golf balls fly straighter to shaving seconds off swimming records at Olympic trials. Some speculate that nanotechnology will allow gear to be designed for individual athletes, enhancing performances from the outside in.

Is the line between allowable and prohibited at the skin, then? Outerwear and specialized equipment are OK, but ingesting performance-enhancing drugs or technology is not?

We’ll have to wait and see on that one, I guess. Most professional sports have boards to regulate the rules of the game and actions of the athletes. They’ll have to navigate the ethics of each technology as it comes up.

What interests me more than how existing sports are relating to new technology is how our concept of sports has changed, thanks to technology, and what we can expect should the singularity come to pass.

Television, for instance, has already had a major effect on sports. Where before we would have had to be physically present to watch a sporting event, we can now cheer on our teams from a distance. This has had far-reaching consequences — just consider the inexplicable ubiquity of Dallas Cowboys fans. With a VCR or TiVo, we can record those performances and review them for errors or highlights at our leisure.

Thanks to national broadcasts, nontraditional sports can gather crowds large enough to popularize them. The X Games, Professional Bull Riders rodeos and NASCAR can be broadcast on noncable channels and pick up fans from across the country.

ESPN and its many subsidiary channels give us access to sports 24/7. This must have some effect on how we think about sports and ourselves as fans.

But perhaps most significantly, television has allowed for the next evolution of sports, it seems — the evolution predicted by Kurzweil’s emphasis on reverse-engineering the brain rather than the body as a whole: video games.

The evolution of computer technology, which has us sitting at desks straining our eyes rather than testing our physical limits, points to a continuation of the emphasis of mind over matter, and begs the question: If Kurzweil’s right, will there even be sports in the future?