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He sees an opening on the left wing and immediately punishes them. After rushing down the side, he looks for his teammates in the center and quickly makes the cross in to finish it off!

Turn on any sports channel and youll hear something similar. Chances are you pictured Ronaldo or another star player running down a fresh pitch. In fact, this could actually describe a play from an artificial intelligence bot in a recent international tournament. Its time to shift our thinking as AI becomes the star player.

As we already know, using AI to enhance human athlete performance is becoming a pervasive practice. The next step for AI in sports is introducing AI players. In fact, we currently have AI agents smart enough to mimic high-level human tactics. They have the potential to revolutionize the sports industry while pushing the envelope regarding what AI can really do.

The immediate response from many people is that such a world will never come to be how could we enjoy watching machines? Many claim that playing against traditional AI can often be a repetitive and boring experience. Others cant imagine any joy from beating their machine opponents. To address this, lets start by examining why we like traditional sports and then outline how AI will come to meet these demands.

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Sports fan psychologists have nailed down eight core reasons why people love their sports.

Many of the motivations mentioned above arent unique to traditional sports. For example, getting together with friends and family to bond is about the people, not about the sport. As such, if the conditions are right, a similar variant involving AI could make inroads into the industry.

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The adoption of AI into the world of sports will be slower than other AI and software applications. Many of the motivations of sports relate to how others around an individual think and behave, so its not enough to change a few people; you need to change preconceptions around an entire industry to be truly effective. Here are four ways were already seeing AI infiltrate sports and how those applications appeal to our existing interest in sports:

Firstly, AI must be able to compete with humans for humans to get interested. We can already see AIs competitive edge with some of our most complex board games and e-sports. Here are some key cases:

These are all examples of deep learning AI, where strategies are not pre-programmed, but learned. Deep learning systems consist of up to billions of individual parameters which are layered together to create a complex network. Some goal is defined for the system, such as winning in a simple two-player game, which the system can begin to optimize toward. This optimization process happens through machine-based trial and error. The system plays millions of games with itself, each time learning about what works and what doesnt, and adjusting its parameters. After all these games, the system will have (hopefully) learned to play at or above its human counterparts, which is exactly what weve seen with the games mentioned above. This brings us to the wild world of e-sports.

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Our robotics capabilities are still somewhat limited, as seen in various robotic games such as soccer. It will still be some time before we can apply AI players to most traditional sports (though Boston Dynamics is getting there quickly). Instead, AI is likely to become most common in the world of e-sports.

E-sports is quickly becoming comparable (in terms of market share) to traditional sports. The industry has eclipsed $1 billion in revenue in 2021 and has a projected 15 percent year-over-year growth. The largest team in e-sports, Cloud 9, had a valuation of over $300 million, which equates to five percent of the worlds largest sports franchise, the Dallas Cowboys, at $7 billion. In prize pools, e-sports already exceed many, including the Golf Masters and Confederations Cup, at over $40 million.

The key thing to note is that e-sports are still relatively new. As opposed to traditional sports, some of which have franchises that are over a century old and have been big businesses for over 30 years, e-sports only began 25 years ago and the most popular game, Dota 2, was released just 10 years ago. The size of the prize pools contrasted with the young e-sports shows how quickly the industry has grown. Once this continued growth hits a critical mass and breaks into the mainstream, e-sports may provide similar family and group affiliation motivation that we see in traditional sports.

Consider that FIFA now runs an international tournament of e-sports for their very own games. For fans at home, the experience is largely the same, watching the same match on the same television with the same live commentary. Granted, the animation of the current games still has room for improvement, but it improves every year with new games. The rapidly advancing animations, along with the fact that theyre AI-generated, allow for far greater creativity. For example, you can watch in 3D and experience being in play or maybe even in the referee's shoes. The fact that the worlds most lucrative sport (soccer) is already moving into e-sports, so it wont be long before others follow.

There are other reasons e-sports make a good first choice for those interested in AI games, such as the ability to more efficiently train and improve AI. For a computer game, AI can play millions of games (e.g. 5 million games for AlphaGo) for training as opposed to traditional sports where AI must physically play the game to learn strategy and test its performance (and even this limitation is something OpenAI is working on).

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Right now, if someone asks you to watch two programs compete against each other inside another program, you might think theyre a little weird. This is a reasonable reaction, but like it or not, AI competitions are becoming more and more mainstream.

There are various competitions between AI that garner millions of viewers. Heres a list of various games and AI representations on YouTube which already have large audiences.

Overall, this is on the order of 100 million views on YouTube, which was only around two percent of one day of streaming(as of 2017). However, given the relatively small community this number is significant. Coupling the growth of AI bots with the growth in e-sports will create massive expansion in the genre as a whole. However, this growth wont be sustainable unless the AI stays interesting.

Once watching AI compete becomes common, well need to find new ways to keep viewers involved. In order to achieve this, its critical that we diversify our AI. People dont want to watch the same thing over and over again. As previously mentioned, one of the motivators for watching sport is entertainment which comes from the chance factor of not knowing who will walk out victorious on any given day. In order to achieve this, the agents must be capable of making various high-level, non-straightforward plays (which weve already seen with Dota 2 and Go, to name a few).

In fact, theres a common misconception that watching AI is a boring experience as they unintelligently copy humans or follow pre-described rulesets. Certainly that was true of machines of the past, but for many years now weve had AI that can act in creative and all-together astonishing ways.

One of the most interesting parts about Googles AlphaGo was its creativity and ways it played that game that were unexpected by humans. Along the same line, in the world of chess, when human players make moves that vary from the standard procedure, referees start to suspect players of using artificial intelligence systems as assistants. Put another way, in the game of chess, creativity is no longer the mark of a human, but that of a machine. Its the same in Go and as time passes, it will become true in other sports, too.

During the AlphaStar training, the Deepmind team observed that the bots adopted various good strategies. One might expect that the bots followed a specific strategy and got better and better at it in time. In fact, the bots could be clumped into various groups and each group had a different way to play the game (e.g. aggressive start, focus on a certain type of units, etc.). In a way, each bot had its own player personality. These personalities, with varied play-styles will keep AI sports both interesting and entertaining for human viewers.

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Once AI agents have become a regular part of our sporting experience, advancements in robotics will catch up, allowing them to play all of the games we usually play, not just for us, but with us. Soccer players will be able to practice against full teams of AI bots that are set to challenge them and help them grow. Theyll also be able to compete in human-robot leagues.

While human biology is relatively fixed, robotics will continue to advance. This means that sports can continue to evolve too. Imagine a game of soccer played at double the pace with a magnetic ball and speeds matching that of tennis? Sounds pretty exciting to me.

Finally, new games can be created that only AI can perfect. As previously mentioned, escape and aesthetic are two of the motivators for sports fans. Watching an AI empowered machine conquer and handle complex games will create a feeling of escape weve never experienced before.

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If the above story comes to be, there would naturally be significant impacts on sports and entertainment.

Sports organizations and related companies should start preparing for these changes before its too late. For the rest of us, likely not much will change. We cant hope to imitate Cristiano Ronaldos beautiful strikes or Federers impossible serves and I wont be able to match the feats of our robotic future athletes. If nothing else, it will be interesting to see how sports evolve in the wake of AI development. So for now, Ill sit back, pick a side and enjoy the game with my friends.

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Is AI the Future of Sports? - Built In

From that understanding has sprung a recognition economy, which takes many forms: employee of the month plaques (and associated free parking spots), holiday chocolates, indoor food trucks. Those perks have become harder to distribute during the pandemic, with some people working from home, and many also trying to build more emotional distance between themselves and their jobs. But high turnover rates and low unemployment have reminded managers that their efforts to motivate workers are sorely needed, just when theyre toughest to execute.

So businesses are devising inventive methods of giving long-distance recognition. (Especially this week: Friday is National Employee Appreciation Day.) They are offering customized candles, shopping sprees, companywide shout-outs and quarterly days off. McKinsey recently hosted a thank-a-thon. O.C. Tanner, a software company, invites workers family members to Zoom meetings celebrating their achievements. Sunglass Huts employees sent 137,000 messages last year on its internal appreciation platform, Sunspired. The gifting company &Open asks its employees to send each other taco emojis over Slack, offering a lunch voucher to the five people with the most tacos at the end of the month.

The bottom-line benefits of workplace affirmation have perhaps never been so widely confirmed and creatively interpreted. But affirmation typically benefits workers who are more vocal about their accomplishments or those who are able to drop family or other personal obligations to pick up last-minute professional tasks. And the stakes of recognition arent just about improving peoples moods but about who gets advancement opportunities and the higher pay that comes with them.

Being affirmed and recognized can build confidence, said Mr. Brennan, who has advised clients to reward their highest-performing workers by inviting them to be C.E.O. for a Day, which means giving full-company presentations and even dressing like the chief executive. Ive seen it turn someone from being staff into a leader.

Executives who emphasize recognition have often learned from periods in their careers when they felt underappreciated. Take Evan Wilson, chief experience officer at Meritrust Credit Union in Wichita, Kan., who spent his earliest office years wondering why no one seemed to notice the extra hours he put in at a regional bank.

He now swears by Dr. White and Dr. Chapmans The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace, adapted from the love languages. Mr. Wilson asks all of his direct reports to take the assessment. And he responds by leaving his office door open for the employee whose language is quality time, for example. He also asks managers at the firm to rate themselves on how good they are at giving recognition, on a scale of one to ten, and suggests that those struggling rely on the languages for a boost.

The problem with appreciation is its like a bucket that leaks, Mr. Wilson said. Its the role of the leader to recognize Im the one who needs to bring that encouragement.

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Bosses Are Finding New Ways to Drive Employee Satisfaction - The New York Times

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Former President Donald Trump hasn't yet posted on Truth Social, the social-media app he launched late February after being barred by Twitter and other platforms, Axios reported.

The social-media app came out on February 20 but is currently only available for US iPhone users. Its launch was plagued with technical hiccups: Many people who downloaded the app say they were unable to create accounts or were placed on waitlists.

As of Wednesday, Trump hadn't posted at all since the platform launched, according to Axios. Popular Information's Judd Legum also said late Thursday that Trump had not added any posts.

Insider was unable to verify these claims because Truth Social is still restricting access to the app.

Axios pointed out that Trump discussed Russia's invasion with Ukraine with multiple news outlets, but has yet to post his thoughts on Truth Social, where they would have garnered more interest in the app.

The only post on Trump's account is from its beta trial in mid-February, when he told users: "Get Ready! Your favorite President will see you soon!"

Trump's account on the app had fewer than80,000 followers as of Wednesday, Axios reported. Trump had close to 90 million Twitter followers before his account was suspended.

Trump announced he was creating his own social-media app in October 2021 after he was banned from several social-media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube in the aftermath of the January 6 Capitol siege. Trump has repeatedly criticized the platforms for removing his accounts, accusing them of censoring free speech.

Insider's Rosie Bradbury downloaded Truth Social the day after its launch, but was only able to create an account on her fifth attempt and has been on a wait list ever since. Truth Social said that "overwhelming demand" meant that that it had to limit how many people could create accounts.

"We have resolved the performance bottlenecks with new user registration and validation, and are working through the new user waitlist at an accelerated rate," Truth Social said in a status update Wednesday.

The app's user interface looks a lot like Twitter, with the ability to "follow" other users, three tabs on each user's page to view their posts, posts and replies, and shared media, and a cover photo and circular profile picture for each account.

Truth Social's logo is also remarkably similar to that of British company Trailar, which fixes solar panels on trucks. An executive at the company told Insider in late February that it was considering legal action against Truth Social because of the similarity of the two logos.

As of Friday morning, Truth Social sits at the No. 11 spot on the Apple App Store's social-media rankings. It has a 4.2-star rating based on 36,300 reviews.

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Trump yet to post on Truth Social since launch 2 weeks ago: reports - Business Insider

Trump made the construction of the US-Mexico border wall a plank of his administration.

The massive wall that straddles the border between the United States and Mexico has been breached thousands of times recently, according to Washington Post. The newspaper obtained unpublished records from documents from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which showed that the wall was breached 3,272 times in the past three years.

The records were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the Post said. The breaches were a result of Mexican smuggling gangs sawing through new segments of the border wall, the document showed.

The records further showed that the US government spent a whopping $2.6 million to repair the breaches during the 2019 to 2021 fiscal years.

According to CBP records, the damage has been more widespread than previously known, pointing to the structure's limitations as an impediment to illegal crossings, said the Post.

Former US President Donald Trump constructed over 800 kilometres of border wall from 2019, which he called "big and beautiful" and "Rolls Royce of barriers". But the smugglers used inexpensive tools such as angle grinders and demolition saws to cut the barrier.

"No structure is impenetrable, so we will continue to work to focus resources on modern, effective border management measures to improve safety and security," CBP spokesman Luis Miranda said in a statement.

The smugglers severed the bollards near the ground, which caused them to swing open with a push, allowing people and narcotics to pass through.

The Washington Post said that a 40-kilometre stretch of wall had 71 bollards with visible repairs and welds.

The report is yet another embarrassment for Trump. In August last year, portions of the wall washed away by floods that ripped through Arizona.

The photos of the damage to the structure were widely shared on the social media.

Trump famously made the construction of a wall along the US-Mexico border a plank of his administration, though much of the 452 miles (727 kilometres) he managed to build over his four-year term was replacing existing barriers.

The work was halted when Biden took office in January this year.

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Trump's "Rolls Royce of Barriers" Breached Thousands Of Times: Report - NDTV

Progressive Democrats notched victories in two of Texass congressional primary races on Tuesday while Ken Paxton, one of the most prominent Republicans in the state and Donald Trump ally, suffered a major blow.

In the most closely watched congressional primary, Jessica Cisneros, a progressive Democrat, forced a runoff against Henry Cuellar, a nine-term congressman who is one of the most conservative Democrats in the US House. (Texas races go to a runoff if no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote.)

Forcing a runoff is a major win for Cisneros, who narrowly lost to Cuellar two years ago. Cuellar has been dogged by corruption allegations after an FBI raid of his home and office earlier this year. Cisneros has been endorsed by the progressive group Justice Democrats, plus Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

Joshua Blank, the research director of the Texas Politics Project at Austin, said it was difficult to predict whether Cuellar would ultimately prevail.

Handicapping his chances is difficult, because on the one hand, he likely has significant organization in the district, but on the other, an incumbent in a strong position shouldnt find himself in so much trouble, he said.

The focus has been on Cisneros progressivism and whether she can win in the general, but Cuellar is one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress and somewhat idiosyncratic within the party, so how this will turn out is anyones guess.

Progressives also scored another victory in a new congressional district that stretches from Austin to San Antonio. Greg Casar, a progressive favorite who led efforts to reduce the police budget on the Austin city council, easily won his partys nomination. He is expected to easily win in the general election in November.

In the Dallas area, Jasmine Crockett, described as one of the most liberal members of the Texas house of representatives, is headed to a runoff election against Jane Hope Hamilton.

Paxton, the attorney general, was forced into a runoff with George P Bush, the Texas land commissioner and the face of a new generation of one of Americas most prominent political dynasties (his uncle is George W Bush). Paxton, who was endorsed by the former president, is one of the most outspoken conservative attorneys general in the country, and has been at the forefront of attacks on voting, abortion access, immigration and transgender Americans. He also led an unsuccessful lawsuit asking the US supreme court to overturn the 2020 election.

But the fact that he is being forced into a runoff underscores how politically vulnerable he may be. He has been under indictment since 2015 for securities fraud and faces whistleblower allegations that he misused his office for personal gain.

Paxton will likely have an easier time with Bush, whose name and legacy in Texas carry a mixed set of baggage, said Blank.

Trump nonetheless tried to frame Tuesdays results in Texas as a mark of his political strength. He noted that the dozens of Republican candidates he endorsed in the race either won or were headed to a runoff. But virtually all of the candidates Trump endorsed were running in non-competitive primaries and were expected to win.

Trump also notably did not endorse Van Taylor, a Republican seeking re-election to Congress in the Dallas suburbs. Taylor voted in favor of a bipartisan 6 January commission, which drew ire from Republicans and several challengers. Taylor will now face a runoff against Keith Self, a former Collin county judge, who told the Texas Tribune that the congressmans vote for a commission was a huge issue.

Taylors district is one of several in Texas that was redrawn last year to become solidly more Republican. In 2020, his district was highly competitive Trump narrowly carried it by 1 percentage point. Trump would have carried the district by 14 points under the new lines, according to Planscore. Its a trend that illustrates how lawmakers are redrawing districts to make them less competitive, a move that benefits extreme candidates in the primary.

Looming over the primary were sweeping new voting restrictions in Texas, in effect for the first time after Republicans in the state legislature passed them last year.

Texas already limits mail-in voting to those aged 65 or older, or who have a qualifying excuse. For weeks, local election officials have been raising alarms that new identification requirements for mail-in ballots are causing them to reject tens of thousands of them. Lisa Wise, the election administrator in El Paso county, said earlier this week her office had flagged 27% of the 3,855 ballots it received so far for rejection. In Harris county, the most populous in the state, officials had flagged 10,876 ballots, 29% of those returned, for potential rejections.

Leah Shah, a county spokeswoman, said the office was working to contact voters and get them to come in person to the election office to correct issues on their ballots. Voters have until Monday to come to the election office and fix defects in person.

The current numbers are unprecedented, far outpacing previous rejection rates. This outcome could have been avoidable if federal protections were in place, said Mimi Marzani, the president of the Texas Civil Rights Project.

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Success for progressives in Texas while Trump ally suffers major blow - The Guardian