Robot Basketball

Earlier this year I made a bet with Craig Mod. He felt sure that robots would soon be able to play basketball better than humans. It’s a reasonable prediction based on the fast advancements in robots running sprints, kicking balls, and shooting baskets. If they can beat the fastest human in the 100 meter dash, why not trounce the Warriors? I think it is inevitable that at some point, we could make a specialty machine that would play basketball better than any human could, but I am skeptical it will happen soon. Craig claimed that by 2040, robots could beat the best human basketball players in a full regulation game. I bet against this timeline and say they will not. The winner has to buy a round of gelato.

I am incredibly optimistic about AIs. They will not only do a lot of knowledge work, and change our jobs, they will also accelerate most scientific and technical fields – including robotics. Faster AI models will inhabit the minds of robots and will also enable our minds to figure out all the technical problems humanoid robots present. There are many.

The major challenge is cramming all the necessary power and compute into a mobile unit able to perform for several hours. It turns out that our form factor is incredibly efficient. Compared to what we do with machines, we are insanely efficient. Our supercomputer brains need only 25 watts, which is orders smaller than LLMs. At their max our human bodies generate less than 100 watts while walking, maybe 400 watts playing basketball, while machines need about 500 watts to walk, and 2,000 to exert strenuously. Gaining five fold efficiency in motors is not impossible in 15 years, but we have been actively optimising motors for over 100 years, so this is not a new incentive. It will be difficult.

In addition to our incredible energy efficiency, humans have two other advantages at the moment. Our resilience and recovery. Robots are stiff, and hard, which means when they fall, they break. Basketball is a contact sport. If a 7 foot human pushes over a robot, it may never get up again. Of course the inverse is true too. Getting hit by a machine will seriously hurt. However humans have a remarkable ability to recover, to get around an injury, in a way machines currently do not. Very small injuries can incapacitate a machine. We don’t have a good way to overcome that yet.

The most important hurdle basketball-robot designers face is the flexibility of humans. It is not that difficult to create a machine that is excellent in shooting baskets, or excellent in sprinting, or excellent in jumping, or excellent in dribbling. The challenge is to combine all these abilities without too many tradeoffs. Humans obviously are an existence proof that all these capabilities can be tuned, but at the same time basketball is a sport that is optimized for human skills that come from water-based meat tissue. Trying to optimize silicon and titanium on the same set of meat skills is a serious hurdle.

The terms of the bet require a full team of robots no bigger than professional basketball players, playing with standard rules of substitutions and duration, competing against the very best pro human players. I might concede that a basketball robot could beat an average human by 2040, or even a decent high school team, but the level of athleticism in professional basketball players is superhuman. They too are alien beings. And very quick learners. Getting the best of them in a sport they live and die in is a near-impossibility by 2040.

Any success in a basketball robot will come from a robot that is designed specifically to play basketball. It will not be able to win at volleyball, let alone football or baseball. The greater lesson I think we will learn is that a general humanoid robot is not going to be that useful. Rather we’ll construct a lot of specialized robots to get things done. Retail store restocking robots, cleaning bots, cooking bots, hospice robots. And in sports, the best performers will specialize in a way that humans kind of do.

To be very clear, I fully expect to watch robot olympics. I will be one of many willing to pay to see robots dance, compete in sports, and amaze us with their kinetic abilities. Basketball robots are likely to invent new basketball moves that humans didn’t think of doing, or couldn’t do easily. In the long-term, robots could change how humans play basketball professionally.

I have no doubt this roboty world will happen, I just seriously doubt it will happen in 14 years. I can taste the gelato.