Does Football Have a Future?

NEW YORK, Aug. 13, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- As we countdown to the 2015 football season, everyone is making predictions. Taking the long view, science fiction author, I. J. Weinstock speculates about the future of football. "If technology is transforming every area of our lives," he asks, "won't it transform football, too?" Along with technological innovation, Weinstock believes that growing concern about concussion-related health-hazards may result in profound changes to the game. "In one hundred years, professional football could be played by robots."

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For Weinstock, the idea of robots playing football isn't as far-fetched as it seems, but rather a logical extension of many of today's trends in our increasingly automated world. "Robots drive our cars, fly our planes, even grow our food. What won't they be doing a hundred years from now?"

He also points to the festering issue of brain injury that has plagued the NFL. "The revelations about the long-term effects of concussions have caused many parents to discourage their children from playing the sport. A recent Time magazine cover story about the death of a high school football player titled 'Is Football Worth It?' makes one wonder how long before we, as a society, reach a tipping point?"

The trend seems obvious to Weinstock—"If computers and apps increasingly do our thinking, Google our remembering, Facebook and Twitter our socializing, and drones our fighting, why wouldn't we outsource the violence in football to robots?"

A former high school football player, Weinstock has thought a lot about the future of football while writing his futuristic novel, ULTRA BOWL, about an NFL team that's "time-napped" and transported 100 years into the future when world power is decided in a football game played by robots.

To make his story work, Weinstock had to invent a plausible 100 year history. "Where once the Super Bowl was the most prized, viewed and expensive ad space, an actual game of robots, showcasing the latest technology while competing in a world championship, would become one big ad. The game's point-spread would determine tech supremacy, stock price and ultimately market share. It would be called the Ultra Bowl because if a nation stumbled, stocks tumbled and economies crumbled."

In Weinstock's view, "the financial backing of Wall Street combined with the political support of a growing segment of Main Street, for whom football is too violent, makes the evolution of robot football not only plausible, but probable."

Why take the speculations of a sci-fi author seriously? Weinstock offers this response: "Science fiction writers try to imagine what tomorrow might look like, and they've often been right. Credit cards, radar, solar power, voicemail, virtual reality, even atomic bombs were all first imagined by sci-fi authors." He then adds, "I may be one of them."

ULTRA BOWL is available in paperback and Kindle (for a limited time as a special pre-season Countdown Deal) on Amazon.com.

To learn more, visit www.UltraBowlBook.com

CONTACT: DreaMaster Books Lilly Julien 818-430-4681 Email

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SOURCE DreaMaster Books