Admit It: An AI Assassin With Van Damme’s Voice Would Be Cool
How AI can change, limit, or free the martial arts.
The year is 2783. You want to learn martial arts after watching some ancient Keanu Reeves movies, so you go the local shopping mall. By “shopping mall”, I mean retro center for those with nostalgia because no one actually goes shopping at malls or eats out at restaurants anymore, ever since the Franchise Wars of 2032. Sylvester Stallone has been looking for a good hamburger since. (He’s cryogenically still kept alive and wakes up once in a while.)
You find the “Karatay” kiosk and start talking to the beautiful but androgynous woman (?) behind the counter before you realize she’s an AI robot. The guy that was just talking to her seems to have just realized this and is embarrassingly shuffling over to the retro anime weeb kiosk.
The woman (?) gives you a tablet with your martial art shopping options. You can learn whatever art you want: Karate, Kung Fu, Japanese Kenpo, Shorinji Kenpo (yes, those two are different), Kempo, American Kenpo, Capoeira, Brazilian Jiu-jitsu (with an “i”), Japanese Jiu-jutsu (with a “u”), Mexican Jiu-jutsu, Puerto Rican Jiu-jutsu, New York Jiu-jitsu, Filipino Stick Fighting, El Savaldorean Prison Fighting, Latino Chancla Throwing…even something called “Choriok”. Your finger hovers over that last one, but the gods of cringe take mercy on you and guide your finger over to the “help” button.
You are then given the option to start a general martial arts program from the comfort of your own home. AI nanobots (really small buggers) in your apartment allow any room to change into a dojo at the drop of a hat, and the program you are downloading uses the same nanobots to create an instructor to your choosing. He can look like Bruce Lee, Cynthia Rothrock, or Bugs Bunny, and talk like Samuel L. Jackson, Bobcat Goldthwait, or Norman from the old Mighty Max TV show. If you pick Norman, he even calls you “Mighty One” and you get a cool red baseball cap.
And so begins your road to black belt (with a fee based on how soon you want to get the belt). You’ll never actually use your training, because AI now does all your self defense for you with automated nanobots in the environment; Earth’s Defense Forces get martial art training installed into their government-issued exoskeletons, and most warfare is done by AI robots anyway.
But hey, it’s a hobby to help you fight off your existential terror.
What do you think? Does this sound like a utopia or dystopia?
There’s actually a good chance society will reach this point in our future. In fact, barring a nuclear/climate fallout that regresses society to a Mad Max timeline, some people believe this could happen soon after 2045.
If you haven’t heard of “the Singularity”, the core ideas were espoused around 1955 by John von Neumann and later expanded on by scientists like Ray Kurzweil. The main idea is that as technology advances, it advances at a faster rate. That’s why your great-great-great grandfather rode a horse all his life but your (great) grandfather saw society go from horses and cars to airplanes and bullet trains; he also saw the invention of the television, computers, and the internet. According to a friend of mine who read Kurzweil’s book (I haven’t), the estimate is that by 2045 or so AI will be so smart that it can do almost anything you want. If it can’t do it yet, it will get to work on creating tech to make it happen.
What does that mean for you as a martial artist and a teacher? Well…that depends. It’s interesting here to point out that a lot (not all) of the most famous Western Sci-Fi presents a negative view of AI with stories like The Terminator, The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Meanwhile, the most popular Eastern anime and manga love to show AI as our friend, in properties like Gundam, Doraemon, and Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy).
Let’s look at the good (?) side first. Here’s an article on how the NBA is using AI to improve player performance. Now. Today. What if we could do that for martial artists? That basketball AI uses game footage and statistics to analyze the players, allowing coaches to make mathematical decisions on effective training and then troubleshoot athlete weaknesses. Training and sleep habits are in turn examined by AI to prevent injuries and health issues. AI is even used to help with scouting and recruiting. It’s then also used to boost fan engagement and optimize advertising and ticket sales. The belief is that humans are still in control, but AI is really doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
This means an impartial and precise AI can look at your fighting technique and correct it for you, if we just start using it. It can study how you react to criticism and give you the correct words to make you shut up and listen. It can catch faults that a human could never catch.
AI is already used in tennis too, and not just for analytics…it’s used to literally judge where a ball landed on the line. Imagine sport karate and full contact mma tournaments judged and analyzed by impartial and highly observant AI that knows your mood and diet for that day. Imagine the feedback you could then get to improve your tournament performance.
And then there’s the surgery miracles that would come with AI advancement, AI surgeons, and restorative hospital operations. The majority of Muay Thai fighters retire in their late 20s or early 30s. For us in Kajukenbo, the running joke is that one of the requirements for a Grandmaster rank is a beer belly. In other arts as well as Kajukenbo, the idea of being a 9th degree black belt at 20 years old is preposterous…but imagine if AI tech could give a 70-year-old fighter a 20-year-old’s body.
What damage could a 9th degree black belt, with 40 years experience, do with young bones and joints? If we don’t kill each other with nuclear bombs, the possibilities of martial arts advancement with technology are limitless.
The negative side of AI for martial artists? I don't think it's the creation of Bruce Lee/Jean-Claude Van Damme ninja robots coming to kill us. That would actually be pretty rad. Is it the destruction of the martial arts “market”, causing all dojos and fight gyms to go out of business?
Maybe. A lot of artists today (painters and such) are boycotting AI art because AI 1: learns by examining real-life-human art and then 2: will leave those artists without a job in the near future. Also, 3: art should come from emotions that robots don’t have yet. Hayao Miyazaki, the famous creator of some of the most beautiful animation ever brought to screen, is disgusted by AI art and considers it “an insult to life itself”.
Fight gyms that only focus on the physical growth of the martialist will one day face the same issue painters face today: obsolescence.
Then again, following this train of thought, nothing you do will have meaning anyway. AI will eventually do all our work for us, and maybe that’s a good (?) thing; it’ll leave us all free to go on vacation, spend quality time with those we love, and finally learn how to bake a cake. All for free. Except, AI will allow you to take those world vacations without leaving your home, to alter people’s facial expressions so you family is deceptively always in a good mood, and will then make that cake for you…
AI will create any painting you want to your smallest detailed requests, and you’ll never have to lift a brush. With all that taken away from you, all that’s left at this point will be the one thing that truly necessitates human art.
What’s left at this point will illustrate the true benefit of martial arts.
I mentioned the following story in our Four Shots of Kajukenbo HEAVY METAL episode, but it belongs here too. Do you know the song Layla, by Eric Clapton, under the guise of “Derek and the Dominoes”?
Layla is a great song. It starts off on fire and chugs gasoline in a way that only a song welcoming that new decade, the 1970s, could ever do. Just when it seems like the song is over and the audio assault fades away, you find that the piano refuses to die, and you’re granted another track that would make you think Slowhand got his nickname from the tears he would slowly rip from a broken-hearted guitar. (Actually, Clapton was given that name for interrupting his live performances with the Yardbirds to change his broken strings, causing the audience to slow clap.)
The song is beautiful. And soon (if not already) AI will be able to write something seemingly as powerful in moments. Here’s a link to YouTube’s AI music channel.
Did you know that there’s a simple chord progression that is considered “the saddest chord progression”? For you musicians, it’s a minor fourth (subdominant), a minor tonic, a major sixth, and a major fifth (dominant); written as “iv-i-VI-V”. For those of you who don’t know what the hell that means, ask your local musician friend and pay them with a beer. Seriously. They’re broke.
The point is, it’s as simple as plugging those four chords into a computer and you have a new hit pop song.
You may also notice that a lot of pop songs play three or four chords on repeat in every section. How many combinations of four chords do you think can exist? They’d all been played to death for centuries, before AI even got the chance to start ripping off musicians.
But here’s where Layla is something different.
Clapton took the name “Layla” from a medieval Persian poem about a forbidden love. The poem inspired the song, a song he wrote for Pattie Boyd, a woman he had fallen head over heels in love with. He was inspired by the old poem because Boyd was married to George Harrison.
For you young punks who think Taylor Swift writing a 10-minute song is something special, Harrison was a member of the Beatles. That’s right, those Beatles. If you’re too young to know who the Beatles were, get the hell out of here and tell your parents they did a terrible job raising you.
Anyway, seven years later Boyd divorces Harrison, apparently while having an affair with Clapton. In 1979 she marries Clapton, the man who had cried into the night through his guitar in that amazing coda for Layla. Nine years of struggle and he finally marries his “Layla”.
They would have ten years of marriage before getting divorced. All good things come to an end.
That story changes everything. It’s the real power of Layla: an expression of hopelessness and the tears that follow, and the eventual triumph of happiness, followed by a death that comes for us all. Knowing the story changes the song and makes it something new. This is the advantage human art will have forever, as long as people appreciate the creation of the art rather than the instant gratification of AI art.
Layla will always be better than any AI song because of the real-life history behind it.
And this is why AI will never really make martial arts obsolete. Learning to fight is one thing. The stories you bring to your art, in training and winning, in fighting for your life physically or mentally, as well as the burning soul you inflame your forms with…that makes you the “artist”. Training the martial arts and recognizing your human experience outside of crushing a guy’s skull in - that’s the same as hearing a song like Layla and understanding the heartbreak behind it.
At least, that’s how it’ll all be until AI can learn to love and hate like humans do. But we’ve got time until then.
…Right?
If you use AI in your social media, at least tell your audience from the start “this was edited by AI”. Also, be sure to check out my books, available here on Amazon. No AI was used in their writing.
