What the FIFA World Cup Taught Us About AI
How do we feel about unappealable objectivity?
This is the part 1 of our thoughts on AI after the FIFA World Cup. You can read part 2 here.
Artificial intelligence has burst onto the playing field, and there’s no going back. This year, there was a lot of excitement leading up to the holidays. All eyes were on Qatar, where the 2022 FIFA World Cup took place. One of the key players in the tournament was the goal line technology known as Video Assisted Referee, or VAR. While VAR was introduced in 2014, this year a new tool was added to help the video and on-field officials make more accurate decisions: Semi-Automated Offside Technology (SAOT). An offside position is one of the most contentious aspects of a match, and a referee’s call has the power to change a match completely when it overturns goals. The national teams’ reactions to this technology become a kind of synecdoche, a sample, of the challenges that we’ll face as working humans.
SAOT AI crunches location data to map players’ positions on the field. If the system detects that a player is offside, it notifies the VAR to amend any on-field decisions if needed. This technology also uses data from a sensor inside the ball that transmits its location 500 times a second. There are also 12 tracking cameras around the stadium that follow not only the ball but also 29 points on a player’s body. Finally, the AI creates a 3D graphic showing the line of offside and the players around it, and this is shown to fans watching the match on TV. A lot has been said about the implementation of this technology in football. After the executives of all leagues signed off on the project, players and fans were left with no choice but to accept the new rules of the game, which effectively changed everything. Some say that celebrating goals doesn’t feel the same; there’s always the possibility of the AI throwing a wet blanket on a victory. The counter-argument is that VAR’s accuracy and swiftness helps make football a fairer game. All of this poses a question we can relate to, even as non-competitive workers sitting in front of a computer: is AI ruining the game?
The question here is not whether our work dynamics will change but rather how we are going to react. What happens when human subjectivity runs up against objective input? Are we competing or cooperating with AI? Is technology making our lives better or worse?
Annoyingly precise
One of the main objections to the use of VAR technology is the belief that it makes the game less human, too automated, and, frankly, less fun. We can find predecessors of football in the Aztec and the Chinese cultures of the 2nd century BC. In one form or another, this game has been around for millennia, existing long before digital technology. It is physical and brutal at times, and it’s also glorious when there are particularly gifted players and solid teams. Football harnesses human passion and, in a way, the idea that it must be protected from modernity and technological tools exists in the collective worldview. This, of course, is a false ideal. Football, like everything else, has evolved, is evolving, and won’t stop evolving. It isn’t the same as it has always been, so there isn’t a pure form to be maintained.
This discussion about football mirrors one we are having in every aspect of our lives. With technology permeating everything, we have an interesting problem on our hands. The biggest problem with the current state of AI is that it holds us to a frustrating level of exactitude.
This fact is quite uncomfortable for us humans. AI seems to be taking over at an incredible speed, and very few people (if any) seem to be ready to explain and guide the process. Open.ai, GPT3, Stable Diffusion, Co-pilot… the AI field is changing everything so fast that it is met with a lot of fear. People aren’t sure how they’ll be able to keep their jobs when there are already AI models that can do them faster and cheaper. The future has arrived sooner than expected, and people are left wondering and waiting to see how things will turn out.
Let’s go back to this year’s World Cup. Many of the greatest teams struggled with a fear of VAR technology. Proactive teams and group leaders were left shaken by the dread of scoring from an offside position. Before, they could see the imaginary line on the field. Like tightrope walkers, they could balance on it at a fast pace. The referee had their own imaginary line, also created by human perception. Every decision relied on a sentient judge. It was easy to disagree with their decisions. Maybe coaches, players, or even fans saw something that the on-field referee couldn’t. But what happens now?
In more than one sense, the boundaries are set by AI. It’s as if the line has been taken out of our imaginations and is now carved in stone. No one can see it, but it’s there and can’t be questioned. Someone else, a non-human entity, is in control. That is not an easy truth to swallow. Will we change our strategies according to this new line? Will we redefine rules to take back control? Do we need to explore ways to work with non-human entities?
We don’t have a choice but to keep on playing.
More and more of us work with AIs, and more and more of us use their logic in our everyday lives. But we have to understand them in order to interact with them.
We are now writing with them, drawing with them, even chatting with them and learning from them. Are we playing with or against them?
Will we ever be able to score?
