 I've never been particularly interested in football. Sure, I have that low-grade knowledge of the game that comes from growing up in a rural town where football and high school were practically inseparable as experiences, but I was always more excited about getting out of class than the opportunity to watch the game. Those Friday night lights never did much for me. So when an article titled "What Football Will Look Like In The Future" started popping up in my social media, it took a while before my curiosity got the better of me and I decided I had to see what everyone was freaking out about. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, please go read it now, because I would hate to spoil the experience for you. Really, I mean it, if you haven't read it, stop and do so. Alright. Those of you who have read 17776, or have decided to ignore my warnings and read on nonetheless, can I just say: "!!!!" Whether or not you're a fan of (american) football, you're with me on that sentiment, right?
17776 asks two questions that are very familiar to science fiction fans - what if machines developed artificial intelligence? and what will earth look like in the future? It's territory that's been thoroughly stomped down by the scifi genre, but Jon Bois' take is so uniquely refreshing in that it asks what will a future earth look like to artificial intelligence? 17776 is of course, not a realistic future - an event that effectively ends both death and birth in humans is quite impossible. But by giving humans endless lives, and endless time, is an easy step to expand that imagination to our current lives, which, in the more privileged parts of the world are both longer and full of more free time than any generation of human beings in history. What do we do with all that free time? We hang out. We play football. What do the artificial intelligences of 17776 do? Hang out. Watch us play football. A brief summary of Bois' work makes it seem silly. But it works. I was moved by these sentient space probes watching these silly football games in a way I never expected to be. With all the time in the world, machines and humans have nothing better to do than football. They've cured death, stopped wars. Space exploration seems to have grind to a halt. But football keeps evolving. 17776 is brilliant not because it imagines a future vastly different from our present, but because it imagines a future that is, in so many ways, just like our day to day lives. As Ten, one of our beloved space probes, explains "now boredom is their only enemy". And how true is this of many of our daily lives? How many underemployed millennials (myself included) are constantly seeking to find ways to fill the empty hours with something that sustains us - whether it's tabletop games, creating weird memes on the internet, or yes, of course, football.
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