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Comment by cellis | Hacker News Reader

If you and Lebron both had mech-suits you'd be equal in strength. Actually you might find that maybe you communicate better with the machine as you've had to communicate a lot more for work and have further refined those neural patterns. So actually, I would expect those with exceptional communication skills and creativity to be the best able to take advantage of AI. In a world where functional code in any language can be spat out at 1000 tokens/s, it matters a lot more that you can communicate your vision than understanding the inscrutable byte-level architecture of ARM-64 or how to write a CUDA kernal, or how to use a static class properly.

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LeBron James still knows more about how to play basketball than whoever is in the mech suit opposite him.

> LeBron James still knows more about how to play basketball

i would bet that there are currently lots of people who would beat LeBron in theoretical basketball, but don't have the body nor the endurance to compete.

But with a mecha-suit, the advantages of any natural born talent, and any issue with endurance or strength, etc, are diminished, leaving only mental capability as a differentiator.

That's not to say that LeBron's mental capability (in regards to basketball) is low - surely it's high. But the combination of high athletisism and mental capability is a rarity right now. Removing one of these conditions (via the mecha-suit) will then increase the pool of "high" performers imho.

LeBron is one of the rare individuals at that intersection of high athleticism and mental capability. It's why at the age of 40, well past his athletic prime, he's still a top NBA player. He has Magnus-level chunking ability enabling prodigious memory for games, he has fast processing and court vision, being able to leverage symmetries to automatically adjust for current player orientations to predict opponent plays. It's what allows him to make passes that seem impossible--he sees windows open up based on predicted player movements, not just current positions. Like that famous Wayne Gretzky quote.

It's a super rare archetype of athleticism/size+mental that only the likes of LeBron, Jokic and Magic Johnson have occupied (not meant to be an exhaustive list).

> leaving only mental capability as a differentiator

I think a huge part of most sports (especially combat ones) is muscle memory. You don't have time to think between moves. So if you want to be good you'll still have to work for days and make your body learn.

And if you think muscle memory is bullshit, try to remember how driving was hard at first and nowadays you can almost sleep through your commute.

I think that’s the same with coding in a stack you really familiar with, especially if you’re fluent in your editor. Sometimes your mind is a few steps ahead of what you’re actually writing. The bulk of the work is below the focus level.

Mech-basketball is a different game than basketball. There would be an entirely new metagame. I just watched Magnus Carlsen get checkmated in 7 moves in magic chess, a move even a 10 year old could find ( vs GM Hansen if you want so see it ).

Another analogy:

"A good archer is going to be an amazing sharpshooter and therefore I only want to field archers (with guns) as soldiers", might be a horrible way to run a modern military.

This "the best at the old thing will be the best at the new thing too!" needs to die in a fire.

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