An early inkling of Armageddon
I and other hacks were loitering in by the dressing-rooms at the Kilkenny venue last Sunday week, waiting for the Wexford players to leave the playing area last Sunday week but we were puzzled by the delay.
I went out to the tunnel entrance and saw Lee Chin making his way to the dressing-rooms very, very slowly.
Every couple of yards the Wexford star was being stopped by supporters for a few seconds, and being an obliging gent, he gave each of them all the time they needed.
There was a time, of course, when all that that entailed was a simple scrawl across a programme, a hurley or an autograph book, but that time has long gone.
Chin — and others — were standing in for photographs, mostly selfies, as smartphones were whipped out and aimed smoothly. Wexford and Tipperary players alike were performing the dance-in, dance-out (“I’ll just stand in here and she can take one, is that ok?”).
So far, so unaffected by artificial intelligence. But bear with me. What happens when the smartphone is replaced, as it inevitably will? In due course, your iPhone or Galaxy will go the way of the beloved Nokia brick, and eventually some kind of eye/ear/skull implant will replace the crude handheld devices now so universally beloved.
When that day comes we’ll look back on the days of smartphone/selfie poses as a quaint affectation, like stopping players from drinking water before games.
Science fiction? Perhaps. Though you’ve probably enjoyed the comedy gold provided by initiatives such as rugby referee Nigel Owens wearing a camera/microphone which allows the viewer to eavesdrop on the zingers he delivers to his players.
The next stage in such devices is obviously a physically embedded version. That isn’t a Jules Verne plot driver: It’s just a few years away.
If you’re unsettled about having technology grafted onto your body, consider that you are already grafted onto a technological entity. The vast omnipresent maw of social media is always on, always with you, always . . . feeding.
If this sounds to you like science fiction, you may not be wrong. The great Dave Eggers has written a prescient novel which riffs on these themes, The Circle, which makes for uncomfortable reading if you are uneasy with what social media means for any old-fashioned notions of privacy.
A key McGuffin in his book is the SeeChange cameras worn by individuals: These broadcast those individuals’ every action online so that politicians, for instance, can thus exhibit their transparency.
Getting worried yet? The coming range of hyper-advanced communication systems, which will be implanted directly, will blur the line between human and machine.
Inevitably this will bring about an obvious conflict in sports as to what exactly constitutes an unfair advantage conferred by technology, but this is an early version of a far more difficult situation hovering on the horizon.
That situation is known technically as The Singularity, the precise moment when technology explodes past human understanding, becomes self-aware and reduces people to the status of, well, nobody knows precisely, though most experts lurch from ‘harvest pods for organic lubricants’ to ‘ornamental dashboard ornaments’.
Think The Terminator meets The Matrix, but without the happy endings.
See, those Instagram photographs of the overpriced Mexican food you had in Dublin last weekend is just the first step to the interconnected Hades awaiting us because, as Eggers puts it in The Circle, all that happens must be known. Thanks, Lee, for giving us all an early inkling of what Armageddon will look like
I see now that Moneyball, the Michael Lewis book about the 2002 Oakland A’s which launched the data/analytics revolution, is now the subject of considerable revisionism.
In a piece which popped up in the Guardian last week, Allen Barra drew attention to glaring issues with Lewis’s book, citing significant A’s players whose contributions are not foregrounded in his account, for instance, both on the pitching staff and among the infield. He also points out that two other key players were later found to have taken performance-enhancing drugs during the 2001-2 period.
When this writer was in San Francisco back in 2011 I had a coffee with a local hack and asked about the reception Moneyball got when it was published from other local sportswriters.
My coffee pal pointed out that those other sportswriters had a) not seen books they’d written become a by-word for a revolution in sports analysis and b) not seen those same books turned into movies starring Brad Pitt, with whom they and their wives would now be friendly...
in other words, how did I think local scribes saw Lewis’s book? I’m not sure whether these newly-found flaws (emerging what , 15 years after publication) are a capital offence, but if I see Danny Kahnemahn kicking up a fuss about the heuristics definitions in The Undoing Project, I’ll be suspicious.
Regarding Nigel Owens, mentioned left, a prince among men and someone who will never be criticised on this page, but surely the time has come for his lead to followed in the GAA?
Last weekend’s pitch invasion/belly-bumping extravaganza in Nowlan Park would have benefited if referee Diarmuid Kirwan had had the opportunity to talk through his decisions on the record either during or after the game.
It seems strange in the 21st century that the one group who can’t talk in public about officiating decisions is the group making those decisions.
I’m working my way through the considerable bulk of This Is London: Life and Death in the World City by Ben Judah.
Thumbs up from this reader for, among other qualities, the considerable reporting that went into the book: It’s some achievement.
I also note, courtesy of Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman, that it’s the 10th anniversary of David Halberstam’s passing.
That’s surprising enough, but the fact that Steve Bannon has been seen with a copy of Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, the magnificent study of the causes of the Vietnam War, is simply unnerving.
Freeman said proceeds from 2017 sales of the book go to ProPublica, the investigative website whose New York office I visited last May.
That being the case, I invite you to buy a copy, thus helping you by introducing you to David Halberstam and helping everyone by supporting investigative journalism.
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