It seems like a lifetime ago that John McEnroe was raging on Wimbledon’s Court No 1 about a dodgy line call. “You can’t be serious, man,” he told the umpire when his serve was called out. “You cannot be serious.” By now, he was bellowing. “That ball was clearly in. How can you possibly call that out?”
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.
It is interesting to note, however, that, in commentary of the match, the venerable analyst Bill Threlfall, said of this incident: “My sympathies are 101 per cent with McEnroe”. The player was right, and the line judge was wrong, but McEnroe, 22 years old at the time, hadn’t quite experienced one of the immutable facets of the human condition: sometimes, life just ain’t fair.
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the blazered line judges sitting on school chairs, a recognisable if parochial feature of Wimbledon for 148 years, have been replaced by an automated system called Electronic Line Calling (ELC) which employs AI in using a human voice to call “Out” or “Fault”.
“The time is right to take this important step in seeking maximum accuracy in our officiating,” said Sally Bolton, Chief Executive of the All England Club, when the announcing the change last year. But what she didn’t mention is that, according to Wimbledon’s own website, ELC requires a “50-strong team of operators” to make sure it works properly.
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.
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This, in microcosm, feeds into one of most important themes in modern life. Before Wimbledon, there was a small, peaceful protest about ELC. “AI took my job,” read one placard. “Don’t let the bots call the shots,” said another. The protestors explained that they wanted to highlight the wider impact of AI on people’s jobs, something that, particularly for young people ready to join the labour market, is a huge concern.
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.
And even in a fully robotised world, it’s hard to imagine that every finely balanced decision, in life, in sport, or exam results, or court verdicts for example, will be utterly fair and accurate, and it’s impossible to fathom where we humans fit in.
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.
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