Robotic Nation Evidence

The robot as manager; it does not compute

The article is discussing the idea that a computer could manage a baseball team. From the article:

If you loaded all sorts of data into Cyb's memory bank and kept it updated to the minute, he could compute the best possible lineup every day.

He could take into account not only a hitter's past against a pitcher, but also break it down to include variables such as home or road, day or night, grass or artificial turf.

Taking it a big step further, Cyb could then manage the game.

For every pitch, he could come up with the best odds on when to bunt and when to swing away, when to change pitchers and who to bring in, where to position the fielders and every other aspect a programmer could imagine.

The author comes to the conclusion that this would not work because of the need to handle "human emotions." But you can codify the emotional factors just as easily and let the computer handle them as well (see Robots interviewing job applicants and robots and the right brain).

Need to directly connect with the plater's emotions to motivate them? The traditional way is a screaming manager. Instead, slap a headset on each player as in Manna. Have the computer manager whisper in the players' ears using words and phrases that have been found -- through extensive psychological testing -- to cause the greatest degree of human motivation in high-performance athletes.

The majority of humans will be managed by robots much sooner than we think. See Manna for details.