business’ of AI in 2100

the 1860s, the sport was known as “America’s pastime.”

Calling it that at any point during the first two decades of the 21st century, though, would be inaccurate, and it’s an example of what can happen when technology and analytics take center stage and the “human element” is lessened or eliminated.

Cognizant of the decrease in fan interest and of plays that made the sport so beloved, several rules were changed for the 2023 season of Major League Baseball, including a ban on the analytics-driven “shift” of fielders.

“We perhaps went too far, so we’re changing it back to a presentation of baseball that we like,” said Mayfield.

He said MLB rule-makers have a pending decision that is much like the choices being dictated by ChatGPT and automated driving.

“They’re already experimenting with automated umpires for balls and strikes in the minor leagues, although it’s not a huge success,” said Mayfield, who sported a St. Louis Cardinals hat during his interview. “If you take away umpires, you take away a human part of the game. And that’s what we’re seeing in other areas as well — taking human beings out of more and more tasks.”

Mayfield referenced Player Piano, the 1952 book by Kurt Vonnegut. In the author’s debut novel, widespread mechanization creates conflict between the wealthy upper class, engineers and managers, who all keep society running, and the lower class, whose skills and purpose in society have been replaced by machines.

“It’s incredibly relevant to right now,” said Mayfield. “That might be one of the real changes in society — the jobs we take away. We might find out that people really need to work,” a lesson that was reinforced during the chaotic first few months of the COVID pandemic.

Another sci-fi plot Mayfield referenced was the Pixar movie WALL-E, set in 2805. Some 700 years earlier — or right around our target year of 2100 – rampant consumerism, corporate greed and environmental neglect had turned Earth into a garbage-strewn wasteland.

“Machines do all the stuff for us, and we sit around in a chair, getting fat,” he said of the plot of the 2008 movie. “If we don’t have to do anything for ourselves, we become ignorant slobs. What happens to us when our cleverness takes all these jobs away? That’s the challenge – to live in the way we like and to do stuff, even though we have the technology to not do it.”

Mayfield also addressed the doomsday scenario with AI, a nightmare depicted in the 2004 Will Smith movie, I, Robot, when robots mobilize against humanity.

“Many fear that AI creations are conscious, but we’re not there yet,” he said. “But we are automating things we didn’t think we could automate. We’re getting pretty good at it, and the pace is moving right along.”

In 1962, the animated series The Jetsons debuted, envisioning a century into the future. One of the characters was Rosie, the Jetson family’s robotic maid and housekeeper.

“It’s more and more probable that we’ll have that — people buying their maid,” said Mayfield. “Roomba will get a real serious upgrade, which is wild, in and of itself.”

The professor hesitated to make any other predictions about how life in 2100 might look. In the world of artificial intelligence, trying to look ahead just a few years is a hard enough task. After all, one of the page one hits for that ChatGPT Google search was “ChatGPT: How to use the AI tool that’s changing everything.”

The technology that is quite possibly “changing everything” wasn’t even a thing at this time a year ago.

“We could do this exercise again in five years and laugh at what we came up with today,” said Mayfield.