[agumonkey]

> Making what irrelevant?

why try to make your body into a super-efficient machine if robots are out of your league, can one exist if he's doomed to be beaten ? maybe it will cause a healthy shift in focus and appreciation about what we try to do (people may still try to reach their full potential even if it will stop being best absolute performance, but only best 'human' performance').

[joshuaissac]

Computers beat humans at chess, but players are still trying to become good at chess.

Cars can travel faster than humans and horses, yet we still have running competitions and horse races.

[HWR_14]

> Cars can travel faster than humans and horses, yet we still have running competitions and horse races.

I don't know why we still have (or broadcast) running competitions.

[krisoft]

> why try to make your body into a super-efficient machine if robots are out of your league, can one exist if he's doomed to be beaten ?

Any couch potato can shoot even the best martial art master dead with widely available cheap tools and a few weeks worth of training. And this is not even a new phenomenay. All practicioners alive today were born into this. Doesn’t seem to have stopped them from practicing.

[wiz21c]

Practicing martial arts leads to much more than being able to perform cool moves. I practice tai chi and I can tell you that my teacher do things you can hardly believe without moving his body much. Using a combination of breathing, accurate movements, he can push you meters away. Really cool. Takes at least dozens of years of intensive training to reach that level. He compares that to training playing piano for international level competitions (such as Concours Reine Elizabeth).

[visarga]

> Any couch potato can shoot even the best martial art master dead with widely available cheap tools

Gun, it's zero effort maximum damage

[pmontra]

I second this but it's not even about being the best of humans. At least 90% of amateur cyclists are out of my league and yet I insist to go cycling, because I like it.

[usrusr]

Cycling is a very interesting example. Cycling was crazy huge for a while when it was the fastest form of individual travel (only trains were faster) and many people moved on when the internal combustion engine became practical. But the subset of the appeal that remained despite engines has been rather stable ever since.

[ryukafalz]

In some places it's faster than a car, due to 1) the sheer volume of cars meaning that any driver will be stuck in traffic and 2) it being way easier to find parking for a bicycle than a car. I live in a city where this is often true.

That said, maybe the appeal that's remained since has been relatively stable overall, but locally it varies a lot depending on the cycling infrastructure that's available. More people ride when they feel safe doing so.

[Pokepokalypse]

When I used to ride my bike to work, I literally turned a 45-minute drive into a 10-minute ride. Unfortunately, the weather in Illinois sucks so I couldn't do it year-round.

[usrusr]

That's not what made people love bikes in that one short time window in the 19th century. It was the fastest thing, period. Bugatti Veyron fastest if you like. Hence the collapse when that ceased to be true. Even horses will outrun a trained cyclist only for very short distances (on longer distances it's roughly a tie even for runners)

[perl4ever]

>It was the fastest thing, period

A steam locomotive was claimed to go 112 mph in 1893, during the craze for "safety bicycles".

Even as early as 1829, a steam locomotive went almost 30 mph.

[usrusr]

That's why I wrote "individual travel" in my original post. The core of what I was getting at is that for many of those fascinated with the bicycle at that time the human powered aspect simply wasn't part of why they loved it. They moved on to e.g. motorcycles as if it was just the next stage of the same thing. Or directly to aviation, as a certain pair of brothers who ran a bike shop did, not before contributing a design tweak to bicycle technology that's still present, unchanged, in almost every bike available today including for example those that were used to win this year's Tour de France (and most likely every iteration before).

[rwnspace]

I think the lack of a stable is part of the appeal, most people don't have anywhere to put a horse.

[usrusr]

Horses outrun moderately trained cyclists only for a very short distance, on longer distances they fall behind runners. The main benefit of a horse is that you can carry more stuff with you.

[pmontra]

Horses must be fed even when you don't ride them. Cars and bicycles stay where you left them and don't ask for anything. But I won't leave a bicycle parked on a street for a week.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Many apartment dwellers find even storing a bicycle to be at best a hassle, at worst almost impossible.

[httpsterio]

how do toi build a robot that executes Kung fu if you have no data points about how the body should move and behave? You'd still need to record an actual human performing them if you want to build a robot that could emulate that.

[agumonkey]

That's not a great joy and is what jet mi complained about, you're used to be beaten and replaced. It's a poor prognosis.

[warglebargle]

why run when you can drive… you’ll never outrun a car

[genewitch]

unless you run into a forest, a beach, a building, between buildings, jump down from a bridge onto an embankment...

[perl4ever]

Now that walking robots are a reality, I'm anticipating when someone produces a set of bolt on legs for a Jeep, for real all terrain capability.