Photo by Alex Haney on Unsplash
As anyone who writes for a living, I have often imagined technology taking my place. What starts as a worrisome prospect immediately devolves into the absurd - picturing actual robots sown with doubt, pacing around the room (or wheeling depending on their skeletal build) and smoking cigarettes, assured that the work their algorithms spit out was garbage and, ergo, the work of a garbage entity.
Of course, robots will not behave this way and our technological job thieves will not take corporeal form, but before I move on, imagine a robotic, pill guzzling Hunter S. Thompsonbot, complete with R2D2-sized and structured accompanying lawyer.
The future of technology-assisted work will be more seamless and within systems you cannot see. And to borrow an impossible turn of phrase: the future of technology is already here. I will run this thingy through Grammarly before publishing - thus likely accelerating the adaptiveness of writing algorithms. I have looked up a couple of things online as writing this, as opposed to walking to a library and, I guess, looking at books?
It will be a long time before technology completely takes over many work functions completely. Look at the assembly line, which still maims humans decades after the technology started punching clocks there.
Reader, I’ve seen the future of technology and humans working together, and it is NOT GOOD. Have you watched any soccer recently? There are three international tournaments happening right now.
The Women’s World Cup - GO USA!
The Men’s North and Central American Gold Cup - /tentatively go usa!
The South American Copa America - NO USA!
All three feature video-assisted review (OR VAR if you’re nasty), a system by which humans monitor the game from a gender-neutral cave to decide whether or not a particular play requires a second look to ensure the right decision was made. The point is they use technology to assess the correct decision when uncertain if the people on the field made the right decision.
The technology has been an incredible success, therefore invalidating any of the preceding paragraphs. SIKE! An abject disaster. And I say this as a hopeless fan of the Venezuelan men’s soccer team (acquired through marriage) who have been fortunate to have 5 FIVE! opponent’s goals waved off for infractions in three matches.
VAR suffers from one fatal flaw - it demands certainty in a sport long governed by context.
I have played soccer for approximately 36 years and I still have no clue what the handball rule is or what it should be. I believe, as defined, there needs to be intent to hit the ball with your arm in order to call a handball. Since soccer matches have long resisted stoppage of play, we do not halt proceedings to establish a jury to identify “intent” whenever a paw hits the pelota.
Unless VAR is scanning your cerebral cortex, it too will not know intent. So referees have used some baselines to help decide whether a handball is called, and it is ill-defined. Basically, as far as I can tell, it’s whether your arm was extended from your body, how egregious it was, and, as much as they will never admit this, the score and time remaining. In short, it’s a human decision that people don’t always like but they understand there.
But we’ve seen the future and I am certain people will not find it a better proposition. Since intent cannot be judged, the game will undoubtedly decide that a handball occurs the moment the arm is an inch away from the body.
And guess what sports fans? The arm is always away from the body. When a robot shows us what we should have seen, there is no grey area. We humans are just along for the ride.
And this hasn’t been the most egregious example of soccer VAR. The official rules require that in a penalty kick situation, the keeper needs to have one foot on the line as the kicker takes the penalty. This is to, I guess, eliminate the possibility that the keeper will rush towards the kicker as soon as he or she starts his or her run, thereby cutting down the space in which he or she can kick towards the goal.
Pre-VAR this was an infraction that was called, albeit it sparingly and only in egregious situations. And sometimes it was NOT. It was not called when Brianna Scurry (who was maybe three feet from the line!) made this iconic save.
It is truly the goal line/keeper infraction that demonstrates the folly of human-robot co-work. As of yet, the robot does not trigger the review. Humans do. Caveat: there is a chip in the ball that determines whether or not it fully crossed the line for a goal - that’s the only scenario where the robot decides to review.
Humans know the spirit of the law. They had been enforcing it for decades! But now that review is available and that it’s a safety net, they will use it - even when they know it will rule against the spirit of the law and what they themselves believe to be the equitable decision. They’ve probably even convinced themselves that they were wrong all those years - that this is the correct way of doing things. Even as the fans riot (even the neutral ones!). And if they do anything to correct this injustice in the offseason they will change the wording of the rules in order to comport with the robot review instead of just saying - we’re not going to use the robot to review that.
This is how it will go throughout the world. We’ll introduce technology to our tasks and they will fundamentally change them, often for the worse! And instead of saying hmmm this is bad, we should turn the robot off, we will instead say, hmm, the robot says this is bad, we should do something else
That’s apparently just how we’re wired.