Last month, I briefly tuned in to see Jake Paul and Mike Tyson dance in the ring for a boxing match that was really just an example of televised elder abuse. Paul is a 27-year-old YouTube star and novice pro boxer, and Tyson is a 58-year-old former heavyweight world champion. I knew I shouldn’t have bothered because I knew how it would go. Still, deep down, I hoped that the bout would begin and end with Tyson making one last twilight charge across the canvas to send Paul sailing through the air with that patented uppercut.

It didn’t happen. I turned it off in the third round when Tyson began to flag in obvious ways. Tyson trudged on through all eight of the two-minute rounds, but age declared victory in the third, and Paul took second place. Paul “won” the fight, to the extent that one can be called a “winner” for pummeling a near-sexagenarian who postponed the fight due to an ulcer flare-up.

I could see why Tyson agreed to the fight. On the one hand, surviving was all he had to do to walk away with a reported $20 million purse (Paul’s was said to be $40 million). On the other hand, perhaps, and more importantly, he felt he had something to prove—as all men tend to do. In his case, it seems likely he wanted to show that time had not yet neutralized the Baddest Man on the Planet.

There was speculation afterward that the fight had been rigged, that Tyson was contractually prohibited from using all the weapons in his arsenal. Maybe. Or maybe people were just hoping Tyson would humble Paul, who, like his brother Logan  gained fame—and infamy—through obnoxious, attention-seeking antics. I do think Jake Paul refrained from trying to kill Tyson as he fatigued. Perhaps bulldozing an aging and revered icon was a bridge too far and an act too cruel, even for someone who has embraced the role of heel by his own admission.

In the aftermath, UFC president and CEO Dana White stated, “Mike was right and I was wrong.” White was convinced that the fight would be a disaster, one that’d most likely end with Tyson being seriously injured or immediately knocked out. That didn’t happen. In fact, at least for the first two rounds, Tyson looked pretty good. Certainly, you could see that someone who still possesses some kind of preternatural athleticism even at age 58 would have made mincemeat of Paul in his prime—back when he was Iron Mike, the man with a knockout-to-win percentage of nearly 90 percent, the man who rarely took a step back in the ring.

A lot of people were rightly disgusted with the spectacle. Apart from the grotesque elder abuse claims, many said it was somehow offensive to the sport, and it may well have been that. My reflex is to agree. However, it’s hard not to admire Tyson’s indomitable will and the human element of it. Maybe that’s also because transhumanists like Elon Musk envision a future where what we recognize today as human has been eradicated or subsumed in digital soup. For example, Musk recently insisted that the military embrace drones over manned combat aircraft. “Meanwhile, some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35,” he wrote, commenting on a video showing drones flying in formation. Musk then listed off a number of problems with the flawed F-35.

“Fighter jets do have the advantage of helping Air Force officers get laid,” wrote Musk. “Drones are much less effective in this regard.” Presumably, those drones would be manufactured by Musk—a defense contractor—or his friends, strengthening the Black Iron Prison a little more.

No more Top Gun pilots. No more human mastery of a craft. No more risk and daring, ill-advised feats of manliness. It’s a bleak, bloodless vision of the future that exchanges “safety” for what makes us human, making us, ironically, given Musk’s dalliance with the right wing, more like “bugmen.”

Tyson’s last ride (I hope) flies in the face of that. He stepped into the ring “Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will,” as Tennyson put it. “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” And that is irrepressibly human.