When Will Artificial Intelligence Replace This Man?

A 25-year-old Erik Spoelstra used to sit in a storage room in the old Miami Arena, evaluating hours of game film to review player performance as an entry-level NBA video coordinator. Eventually, he climbed out of the audio visual muck to become head coach of the NBA's Miami Heat, where he would go on to win two championships. It's a classic story of rags to riches--rising from junior video coordinator to head coach in about 13 years--and it may now be unlikely to ever happen again, as computers take over the position that gave Spoelstra his start. "If an AI were fed videos of a huge number of past NBA games, and were smart enough to understand the events occurring in the games, then it could do a better job at making tactical basketball decisions like choosing starting lineups," said Ben Goertzel, a prominent futurist and lead researcher in the OpenCog AI lab at Hong Kong's Polytechnic University. "As AIs with robust video understanding become widespread, I'd expect that we could see AI sports assistants start to play a serious role," he said.