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> Why do we watch Olympic runners, when cars on your average city street easily exceed Usain Bolt's top speed on their morning drive to Starbucks? Why do we watch the Tour de France, when we can watch Uber Eats drivers on their 150cc scooters easily outpace top cyclists? I'm sure within a couple years a Boston Dynamics robot will be able to out-gymnast Simone Biles or out-skate Surya Bonaly.

Big sports events are the "circenses" part of "panem et circenses" [1]. Fun fact concerning this: the German word for "entertainment" is "Unterhaltung"; thus it can be argued that the purpose of entertainment/Unterhaltung is "unten halten" (to keep at the bottom), i.e. to keep the mass of the populace at the bottom, or in other words: to prevent the mass of the populace from coming up.

> Would anyone watch these robots in competition?

I have seen robot fight competitions both live and in videos, and I have to admit that these are not boring to watch.

So yes, with a proper marketing I can easily imagine that lots of people would love to see broadcasts of some robot competitions.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

To be fair, most robot turnaments are still very much about human intellectual and engineering achievements. The robots are just a vessel

> the German word for "entertainment" is "Unterhaltung"; thus it can be argued that the purpose of entertainment/Unterhaltung is "unten halten"

No, that would be "Untenhaltung", which isn't an actual German word, but could be.

"unterhalten" in German can both mean to entertain (however, not as in "entertaining a notion") having a conversation, as well as "to maintain". It has several meanings, all of them positive.

Chess is a good example.

When chess engines started becoming really good, some people worried that competitive chess would die. Today, grandmasters stand no chance against a smartphone, and yet, chess popularity is at an all time high.

I respectfully disagree with this statement in the sense that if the whole world ends up becoming like a chess tournament. It would become insanely more harder for us to live our lives peacefully. The life of a chess player is filled with stress.

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47587863) A comment I had written sometime ago. Aside from a very few at the top, I have seen some chess players regret in a very nostalgic way.

The chess industry continues to allege against each other and we lost a star (Rest in peace, Daniel Naroditsky) because of it. The current world champion himself is struggling from all the pressure put on a 19 year old boy.

We enjoy playing against each other but man it is competitive if you wish to feed families.

Most of us play chess out of leisure. I am unsure how a world where everyone does something akin to chess competitively (ie. for money, as we wish to feed our children and ourselves) would look like.

One can say something similar to UBI might be needed and then we all play chess in leisure, but I don't think that is what most people propose when they mention the example of chess.

> Chess is a good example.

Chess is an unusually poor example. When computers took over Chess, we didn't have something stupid like 30% of employment relying on playing Chess to eat and pay rent.

The analogy only makes sense if you're already convinced that we won't lose the majority of white-collar work to computers.

To those who are not convinced that we are looking at making 50% of the workforce redundant, Chess is an analogy that makes no sense.

It only makes sense if you're already a true believer.

Ironic seeing as how we canceled the Olympics during the world wars instead of the other way around.

So us lucky survivors can take heart in the fact that we may still be able to perform for the ultra-rich as gladiators?

A lot of the inequality is a political choice that could be changed if people vote to do so.

People do watch F1 and Nascar though, and those get more viewers than running or cycling typically.

All of those sports make intuitive sense to me, I really don't get why we make such a big thing of balls though.

I'm not really into either F1 or Nascar, but my impression from the outside is that those sports are still primarily about the drivers

F1 is somewhat about which company can build a better car. But any real improvements seem to invariably lead to a rule change that bans that improvement in future seasons. So you are back to drivers being the most visible differentiator

And yet there are orders of magnitude more cars than olympic athletes, and most olympic athletes struggle to make much money on it.

So, sure, there will be space for some human achievement for the sake of it, but, most fewer and fewer people will make a living off that.

Olympic Athletes are the fruits of our labour. They are what things like money and cars are for.

I'd say JS Bach was one of the fruits of our labor, so were Newton, Einstein and van Gogh.

Olympic Athletes are a combination of luck in the genetics department and a lot of effort, but ultimately do not seem to be sufficient to help the athletes themselves.

Sucks for us that don't care one iota about sports, but care about the arts.

The point is that the same thing is likely to occur with the arts

> "bullshit jobs" [0] exist primarily because we value human contact

They are not "bullshit jobs"

They will become so only after the day when AI "help" and "support" is actually better than talking to a human.

Which is not happening anytime soon, possibly never. Call me when it happens

Support jobs are very definitely not "bullshit jobs".