Saturday 6 July, Wimbledon: in the match between Pavlyuchenkova and Kartal, an obvious “out” ball is reported good. Oh, it happens. It shouldn’t but happen. Except that this time there was no line judge to make mistakes but Hawk -Eye, the electronic system that should eliminate errors.
Was the problem Hawk-Eye? Macché, it was off, deactivated on a portion of the field by a human operator after a not completed technical test. What happened? Point assigned to the wrong person, his electronic watches. But at Roland Garros, just a few weeks ago, during the game between Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, a human judge declared out a ball that was clearly inside, penalizing Sinner, given that the referee did not intervene, and everything was spun as if nothing had happened. So much so that when I learned that in Wimbledon there would be electronic detection systems I thought more badly (I was very angry because I am a sinnerist, although he does not follow tennis, only Sinner, I live on personified obsessions, in this case I have a nationalpopolar).
It goes without saying on social media the usual global indignation made of technophobia and retrograde nostalgia of the screaming judges and hashtags and tennis sentimentalisms, and despite the machine it was not defective as they had not worked was those who had to make it work.
For heaven’s sake, there are also cases in which the machine can make mistakes alone, without human intervention, nothing is infallible. I don’t know if you remember: at the end of December 2024 in the United States a robotaxi waymo began to turn in the round in a parking lot without being able to go out, leaving the passenger to orbit for minutes like an unfortunate planet around a roundabout. Nobody got hurt and the guy risked losing the plane, oh well. There was no human to blame: there was wrong the algorithm there. Happens. Rarely, but it happens.
However, when you are wrong a car you are scandalized much more, even if the statistics say that it is wrong than man. In the case of autonomous driving cars, the percentage of accidents compared to human drivers from all studies is around 90% less. It will be because a car driven by artificial intelligence is not tired, it is not distracted, she is not in love, she has not quarreled with her girlfriend, she is not drunk.
Despite this, when we make a human, we understand it, let’s say that making mistakes is human, while if you make a machine to make a car it seems inhuman, however much mistakes (or, as in the case of Wimbledon, had not really been on).