One of the biggest fears of the 21st century is the loss of jobs and incomes as a result of Artificial Intelligence (AI) replacing human beings. Historically, machines have been invented to perform work that was previously done by humans.
Those machines, however, were never capable of thinking like people. AI has completely changed this situation, and today some machines provide solutions faster and sometimes better than the human brain can manage. Some of the most affected sectors include banking, software engineering, filmmaking, and architecture.
AI can now produce new software in just one or two days, just as it can help create a movie within three to seven days. These are processes that previously took humans weeks or even months. Some AI-generated movies look so realistic that it is difficult to tell whether the stunts were actually performed or created digitally.
Today, instead of pursuing traditional video production courses that take years at university, many people are opting to learn how to use AI tools in just a few weeks. In the current environment, it has become harder to appreciate the expensive special effects that once required highly skilled and creative professionals, because AI can now achieve similar results in hours while someone sits comfortably behind a computer.
While AI is rapidly reducing jobs in some sectors such as videography and software engineering, this is not the case with sports. Around the world, people still want to watch real athletes competing rather than robots or AI-generated images. Even with the rise of video games, the excitement of watching human competition has not diminished.
Some video games, such as FIFA in football or Deep Blue in chess, demonstrate extraordinary levels of AI. Deep Blue, for example, can analyse about 200 million possible moves per second before selecting the best option. No human brain can match that speed. This helps explain why only Russian chess champion Garry Kasparov managed to defeat the computer in 1997, and even he was unable to repeat that success afterwards.
Chess illustrates how AI has not replaced human athletes because organisers and players can easily choose whether to compete against humans or computers. That choice rests entirely with competition organisers and does not fundamentally affect the appeal of the sport. This differs from manufacturing industries, where owners often choose AI-powered machines because they make production cheaper, faster, and more precise.
It is difficult to imagine a time when people would prefer watching AI-generated athletes or robots competing over real human beings. This has already been tested through video games and esports across many disciplines, yet traditional human competition remains more appealing.
Sports are therefore among the sectors most likely to withstand job losses linked to the rapid growth of Artificial Intelligence. If AI could truly replace human sporting talent, video games and esports would already have done so.
The writer is a Bush Lawyer, former President of the Uganda Table Tennis Association (UTTA), Secretary General of the Union of Uganda Sports Federations and Associations (UUSFA), and a Board Member of the Uganda Olympic Committee (UOC).
