What will Super Bowl 100 look like?
As we celebrate the historic milestone of Super Bowl 50, I can’t help but wonder about the future of football. The “inconvenient truth” of Will Smith’s movie “Concussion” — about the festering issue of CTE brain injury — is just the latest revelation about the dark side of football that plagues the NFL.
The long-term effects of concussions have caused former players to sue, promising rookies to retire, and many parents to discourage their children from playing the sport. A recent Time magazine cover story about the death of a high school football player entitled ‘Is Football Worth It?’ makes one wonder how long before we, as a society, reach a tipping point? Will there be a Super Bowl 100?
Having written the sci-fi novel ULTRA BOWL — about an NFL team that’s “time-napped” into the future — I’ve thought a lot about the issues facing football. I believe a credible argument can be made that concerns about football’s health-hazards combined with our economy’s increasing reliance on technology and robotics will result in profound changes to the game. If there’s a Super Bowl 100, there’s a good chance it’ll be played by robots.
Hear me out…. Robot football isn’t as far-fetched as it seems, but rather a logical extension of many of today’s trends in our increasingly automated, AI-enabled world. Robots drive our cars, fly our planes, grow our food. What won’t they be doing 50 years from now? Technology has allowed us to outsource many aspects of our lives. Computers and apps increasingly do our thinking, Google our remembering, Facebook and Twitter our socializing, and drones our fighting. Eventually, we may outsource the violence in football to robots.
Here’s a scenario that could play out over the next fifty years. Plausible? Possible? You be the judge.
Football: The Next Fifty Years?
While American tech start-ups create social media platforms and huge IPOs, Japan becomes a leader in robotics, and China, the “sleeping dragon,” awakes to become the cheap manufacturing center for the world. Increasingly employing robots, China quickly becomes a technology leader to be reckoned with.
A few decades into the 21st century, during an International Robotics Exhibition, China unveils a robot football team — what better way to challenge America’s technological dominance — and announces a series of robot exhibition games with Japan. The media cynically labels these robot games the ultimate version of kick the can. Yet year after year, robot performances improve and a robot football league, the RFL, is born.
What begins for many as a joke, soon becomes a worldwide phenomenon with legions of hardcore fans. And it isn’t long before the NFL is besieged by a public clamoring for a “friendly” exhibition game with the RFL. The NFL declines.
As the world economy increasingly depends on robotics, Corporate America realizes that robot football is the perfect marketing vehicle. If the Super Bowl is the most prized, viewed and expensive ad space, an actual game of robots, showcasing the latest technology, is one big ad. The game’s point-spread will determine tech supremacy and ultimately market share.
Fearing America could lose the world robotics market, the tech industry lobbies the government to develop a U.S. robot football team to compete in the RFL. By mid-century, America decides to face up to the challenge and establishes NAFA — the National Android Football Administration. Like the old NASA, its mission is not to put a man on the moon, but to field the best robot football team in the world.
At first the U.S. team is no match for the other nations of the RFL. Each year NAFA unveils improved models that incorporate the latest advances in carbon nano-tube technology. Soon America becomes competitive.
As the audience for robot football grows, interest in NFL football declines. To compete with the increasingly popular RFL, the NFL waives the rules that protect players in order to make the game more “entertaining.” Despite this “blood & guts” strategy, NFL attendance continues to drop.
Eventually, the interests of a growing segment of Main Street for whom football is too dangerous, and the interests of Wall Street combine in a powerful political movement that legislates the abolition of professional football. The NFL is disbanded. The prohibition of football, admittedly an over-reaction, lasts less than a decade. By the time it’s repealed, it’s too late — humans have stopped playing football.
It’s only a matter of time before the RFL becomes the ultimate technological battleground between nations. The championship game is called the Ultra Bowl because if a nation stumbles, stocks tumble and economies crumble. In only a few decades, the Ultra Bowl evolves from a freak sideshow spectacle to the preeminent global event that determines world economic power.
* * *
The idea of robots playing football sounds crazy, I know. But many of the things we take for granted today sounded crazy only a few decades ago. In Two Minute Warning: How Concussion, Crime, and Controversy Could Kill the NFL, veteran sports journalist Mike Freeman ends his recently published book by introducing my sci-fi novel ULTRA BOWL and quoting me at length about the very real possibility of robot football in the future. His last words are, “I’m not laughing.”
So next time you see the Fox Sports’ NFL mascot “Cleatus the Robot,” ask yourself: Is it a harbinger of things to come? It’s hard to imagine our NFL “gladiators” not going head-to-head on any given future Sunday, but 2,000 years ago the mighty Romans believed that their gladiators would still be fighting to the death today.
Why, you might ask, should the speculations of a sci-fi author be taken seriously? Since the late 19th century, when Jules Verne wrote about submarines in “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” writers have tried to imagine what tomorrow might look like. In many cases, they were right: credit cards, radar, solar power, voicemail, flat-screen TVs, virtual reality, even atomic bombs were first imagined by science fiction writers. Who knows, I may be one of them.
___________
I. J. Weinstock, a former high school football player, is the author of ULTRA BOWL.
