In – or out? Wimbledon considers replacing line judges with AI

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 64 points –
In – or out? Wimbledon considers replacing line judges with AI
theguardian.com

Tournament director says tennis club needs to balance preserving traditions with technological innovation

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What exactly is the problem they're trying to solve here?

If it's just calling in or out, electronic tripwires, ground sensors and cameras are enough. Why would AI come into the picture?

Or is this one of those old-men-trying-to-use-buzzwords situation? "We are going to employ generative AI machine learning blockchain cloud technology"?

Exactly this! No need for AI, just some sensors should be plentiful.

Yeah we've had the technology to do this better than humans for decades. Machine learning would be an unnecessarily complicated solution.

What's with wanting to replace all judges/referees in every sports with robots? Computer/Video assistance is fine, replacing them with bots is not.

For tennis in particular since that's what the article is about, the way it is now doesn't interfere with the match, it's a quick check, the decision is taken and they move on. Unlike football (soccer for you yanks), VAR is so much worse. In my opinion it should have stopped at goal line technology, and maybe offsides on goals, but checking every 5 minutes if something happened or not? That's just interference at this point. Remember when 5 minutes of added time used to be considered a lot? Now that's like average. And then you have baseball, they want to add the auto strike zone. And it goes on and on and on in every sport. It never ends, every sport is being polluted by "robots umpires".

I guess I'm just too old fashion or a purist or whatever you want to call it, but I want the human aspect when I'm watching/attending sports events, and humans make mistakes. Sure I've been angry at some decisions taken over the years, but that's also part of the beauty of sports. Sometimes it goes your way, sometimes it doesn't, it makes the event so much more enticing.

Eh I don't know if I agree with that line of thinking. The issue with VAR is that even after taking so long, the decisions aren't much better. If we have the technology to take better decisions, I believe we should be using it.

Even with VAR, I believe we are better off now that we were before. The most frustrating part of a sport is having the referee decide a pivotal moment in a game and VAR aims to reduce that at the cost of some extra time. I hope in a couple years. The technology will get better too.

Good automation solves problems rapidly.

Bad automation creates problems rapidly.

Doesn’t seem to be worth the risk.