Is the idea of uploading a digital Danny MaCaskill to your bike – or even your body – that far fetched?
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Mountain bikers have been leaning on motors and batteries to get us up hills for a while, and GPS systems to get us back home safely for even longer. Shimano has Autoshift and SRAM developed Eagle Powertrain with Auto Shift so you don’t have to bother with gear changes anymore. And then there’s Magura, which introduced Bosch eBike ABS so you can haul on the anchors on slippy roots without a second thought.
But then last week we had a glimpse of the future, and boy was it weird. You probably saw it already, that robot bike doing trials riding, but it got me thinking. If machines are already helping our legs, brains and fingers on the bike, how long before we’re relying on robots to help us ride technical trails too? And in case you missed, here’s the vid… If your initial reaction is one of Black Mirror horror at this dystopian vision of mountain biking, then I’ve got bad news. Worrying about machine intervention in mountain biking is as pointless as panicking about AI. It’s already way ahead of where we realise it is and already has a longer tail in tech than you probably recognise too.
I’m not just talking about the change in attitude to e-bikes that’s occurred in the past few years. I can remember the outrage people had to reviews of […]
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