Another fine mess at Wimbledon ...Middle East

In a matter of seconds, he had gone from bemusement to fury to crazed meltdown, and still today – this happened back in 1981 – it is regarded as the apogee of bad behaviour on the lawns of the All England Club.

And so we come to Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, who, this past weekend, became the latest in a lineage established by McEnroe of tennis players to challenge the authority of line judging at Wimbledon. “You took the game away from me,” the Russian player said to the umpire when, at a crucial moment in her match, her opponent’s shot – clearly out – was called in.

But whereas McEnroe was fulminating about human error, Pavlyuchenkova was raging against the machine. For this year’s championships, the blazered line judges sitting on school chairs, a recognisable if parochial feature of Wimbledon for 148 years, have been replaced by an automated system called Electronic Line Calling (ELC) which employs AI in using a human voice to call “Out” or “Fault”.

So it’s not exactly infallible, as Pavlyuchenkova found out (although the point was replayed and she went on to win her match). Nor was it entirely the machine’s fault. It turns out that it was, in fact, human error to blame. Someone had forgotten to switch the system on, and, in the same way that VAR was supposed to eliminate bad calls in football but still requires the participation of a human being, we are learning that robots don’t as yet have all the answers. At some level, they still need us, if to do little more than plug them in.

square STEFANO HATFIELD

Wimbledon is British elitism at its worst

No one, it seems, has a job for life any more, and it’s frightening when you comprehend the power and range of automation of thought and information. But not of impulse and emotion, of course, and until such time that robots can programme, sensitise and operate robots (not far away, I’m sure) there will be a place for human intervention.

Nevertheless, it is something of a shame that Wimbledon, a bastion of tradition, couldn’t resist the robotic promise of a faultless life. As events the weekend proved, this is an impossible dream. And they should have known this before telling the line judges to hang up their blazers.

Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Another fine mess at Wimbledon )

Also on site :

• Morning Report — Texas braces for more flood danger after Hill Country tragedy 
• Bangladesh lawyers challenge ex-PM Hasina’s murder trial charges
• Ukraine plagued by ‘palace politics’ and purges – Economist