I had an interesting chat the other day with someone on the back of Celtic FC moving into eSports and they were musing about how it’s good to see clubs trying to do this sort of thing to expand their fanbase and interests.
We joked about how the clubs would next be moving into drone racing to take on the FPV Scotland racers… but it turns out that computing is already developing AI drone racers because clearly being able to win at the classics like Go and nearly winning at StarCraft isn’t enough for AI…
A team at KAUST led by Bernard Ghanem, associate professor of electrical engineering in the University’s Visual Computing Centre are doing the heavy lifting on this one.
As the article notes: “Currently UAV racers manually fly the vehicle through gates, competing to maneuver the UAV through the greatest number of gates in the shortest amount of time. A machine learning-trained UAV recently outperformed novice and intermediate human pilots in a simulated racing game.”
(Yes, there’s huge implications to that one, but we’ll come back to them in another post.)
There’s two takeaways from this:
- The minute something is invented now, others are trying to see if machines can get involved. Even things that may not necessarily need AI involvement, someone, somewhere will try and see if they can make it work.
- The minute something is created – drones are still relatively new for serious businesses – there’s a potential disruption coming.
Everything can be disrupted now…
There’s a considerable point being made in that last statement because the knock-on there is on education – can we expect people to spend years to learn something and be an expert if there’s a considerable chance that even before their learning is done, software may come in and take over? (The talented Theo Priestly recently made this point on LinkedIn when noting that the current sexy job of data scientist is primed to be taken over by AI.)
