Off Road, Off Kilter

If you thought F1 had become stultifyingly boring through corporate interference and the continuing escalation of sponsorship bollocks; think again: there's a new kid in town and he's even worse. I share with you possibly one of the most surreal, nay, absurd spectacles of our modern age: the AI-powered motor race that recently 'happened' on the Abu Dhabi F1 circuit. Shambles, farce, outright folly, or triumph of software engineering; call it what you will, but t'weren't racing, m'boy. A stupidly expensive attempt at something completely bereft of purpose or future maybe, but the future of motorsport? Give me break. As clever as it is to actually get these vehicles to navigate their way around anywhere is; the failure of these cutting edge vehicles to do so consistently or frankly safely,  makes me worry that, like the Post Office and Horizon, we cleave too much to 'tech' at the expense of basic utility, and at a potential cost to real people's lives.

In the case of this particular farrago, there doesn't even seem to be a point behind the exercise in sporting terms. Who the hell wants to watch machines 'competing' against other? The point of sport is that people are the variable element in whatever activity they're involved in, be it cricket, rugby, rallying, etc., etc. It is human fallibility and the desire to reduce that fallibility to a minimum that makes sport good to view. Take that away and you are left with an empty technical exercise, devoid of human interest: devoid of sport itself. Lose that competitive element - an entirely human, flawed, emotional component - and the point of it all becomes abstracted to the point of sterility, with the only 'competition' subsisting in the efforts of one group of people trying to write better files of ones and zeroes than the next. Nah, mate, not for me...