Robots as umpires and referees?
Artificial intelligence is about to take on one of the most iconic jobs in all of sports: the baseball umpire.
This summer, teams in the AAA league – just one level below Major League Baseball itself – will use sophisticated technology to call balls and strikes on batters. Human umpires will still crouch behind the plate, but a voice in their earpieces will tell them to shout out “ball” or “strike” – as determined by a system known as Automated Ball-Strike.
ABS will even calculate different-sized strike zones for tall or short players, just as human umpires must do. Human umps will be able to override the ABS if they feel it made a mistake. (Some early versions had trouble calling curveballs correctly.) And they will continue to do other things umps do, like call an out made on the base paths, separate angry opposing players to prevent fights, and of course dust off home plate.
For well over a century, umpires have stood as one of the most human elements of baseball. How they make calls can affect the outcome of a game. They inevitably have human failings. But how they see things, whether right or wrong in the view of any individual fan, is how it will go down. They are the boss. In the end, it’s a human being who is running a game being played by other humans.
More and more, technology is invading sports. Data is being crunched ever more thoroughly to assess the value of individual players. Statistics advise managers on what decisions to make, such as which players to use and when. Yet sometimes a special joy can well up in a fan when a player defies the odds and succeeds when the data says it shouldn’t happen.
Computer vision, more acute than that of humans, has proved useful. Tennis shots can be ruled in or out of bounds by cameras able to detect what is only a blur to the human eye. In American football, replays halt the action while referees study plays from many angles using video from multiple cameras. And this year FIFA, the body governing international soccer, will experiment with a system that aims to call offsides more quickly and accurately than human referees.
In cases where the use of technology can make a sports competition fairer to teams, players, and their fans, by reducing the number of “bad calls,” it can be a boon to sports. Robot refs could also help solve shortages of volunteer referees at the amateur level, in sports such as soccer. A game might be run by a single official aided by technology that does parts of the job such as calling balls in or out of bounds.
Today the possibility exists that a human umpire or referee could be bribed or hold prejudices, consciously or unconsciously. Using robo-umps would seem to avoid those human failings. But what if hackers got inside a robo-ump’s program and could change its calls?
Lots of questions to be answered still lie ahead. In the meantime, play ball!
