The First Profession to Be Replaced by Robots Could Be … Sports Referees?

In theory, a robotic referee would never miss a call, show bias or be bribed. It would make decisions instantly and eliminate the sometimes-agonizing wait involved in sports where video replay is used to review and sometimes change a call already made on the field. In other words, the data shows robots would make much better referees than humans. This isn’t just a futuristic idea either. Most line calls in tennis are already made by bots. The NFL, NBA and MLB have all been testing some versions of automated officiating. Perhaps most importantly, there aren’t large groups of people protesting to save referee jobs.

All of this points to the perhaps surprising conclusion that maybe this will become one of the earliest testing groups for widespread automation to see how it might work when rolled out. Will people respect the results and accept it as an element of the game? Do we even want perfection from referees, or some level of judgement calls in terms of which penalties to call and which to let go, in favor of letting athletes play on? These are the sorts of questions that may soon become urgent for us all.