Wimbledon: Man's incredible performance in the face of machine and artificial intelligence technology

I was fortunate enough to watch a round of the Wimbledon tennis tournament . As soon as I sat down in the stands, before the match began, I noticed a difference from other years: there wasn't even a line judge. When something changes in Great Britain, it's a disruption of a consolidated liturgy, a discontinuity that destabilizes. Rightly or wrongly, despite the constant pursuit of economic and social contemporaneity, the British world preserves traditions and rituals like no other country in the world.

Or so it seems to me. It's not a political issue between Labour and Tories ; regardless of the party name, Great Britain is a conservative country. Or, if you prefer, traditionalist. Very traditionalist. Noting the absence of linesmen on the grass courts at Wimbledon was a bit of a shock.

Don't worry, everything was fine with the match dynamics. Artificial intelligence took care of it. A complex system of cameras, video surveillance, and rules stored by a supercomputer allowed the match to proceed, even with vocal accompaniment—again, the voice was synthetic, computerized—simulated in a harmonious (and politically correct) alternation between female and male voices.

The only human presence left on the court, besides the players, was the umpire on the stand. For almost the entire match, his role was clearly useless. A notary stripped of all authority, attentive to the match more or less like the other thousand spectators. Then suddenly, the unexpected. A shot clearly goes out of bounds, beyond the baseline; nothing to raise any doubt; the line remained at least a hand's breadth away from the point of contact between the ball and the grass. And yet, the usual synthetic voice—it should have been male, to respect the alternation—is not heard, with "artificial" precision, condemning the "out" that everyone expected.

Even the players on the field expected it. Even the umpire on the stand expected it. Instead, silence. First, the silence of the missed "out." Then, after the score update—again, dictated by the Artificial Intelligence itself—which had accounted for the error as if it hadn't happened, the crowd's silence became a buzz.

The player who was the victim of the "artificial" oversight should have served, but he's hesitant. He looks at the crowd, then turns to the umpire, who seems intent on listening to something through his headphones. He raises an arm and shouts, "Stop." It's official: Wimbledon, there's a problem. As everything comes to a halt, the human umpire on the stand begins a conference: he doesn't just listen to what's being said through his headphones, but responds into his microphone, which, however, has been muted.

A couple of minutes pass. From his perch, the referee turns his microphone back on and announces what everyone has been hearing: "The artificial intelligence system has temporarily malfunctioned. It will be restored shortly and we can resume the match." General relief erupts, with predictable comments that would have been more serious in Italy: "It may be artificial, but so much for intelligence!"

The synthetic voice returns, this time a female one, and summarizes the score, as if the ball out had never been played . The referee from his perch adds his own voice, to clarify: "We're recovering from before the tilt. We're playing the ball again." But how? Do human eyes and intelligence surrender to the error of the artificial one? Everyone had seen the ball out. It was a "15" against whoever had missed. It was obvious, self-evident.

But no. If the machine makes a mistake, everything has to be redone. The human eye, which saw the player's and the AI's mistakes, isn't enough. No, humans have been definitively stripped of their authority, excluded. They can no longer intervene. We start again where the machine stopped working. Its mistake doesn't matter; reality, stripped of its control, is erased, as if nothing had happened. How can we put it? It's an incredible surrender of humanity before machines and technology.

If we wanted to evoke a Veltroni-esque remark – when the controversy arose over films on TV interrupted by commercials – we could say that “you can't interrupt an emotion” .

But there's more: was it necessary? Was it really necessary to prefer artificial intelligence to human linesmen (perhaps aided by the sort of VAR we saw in Paris or Rome)? And again: why, faced with a glaring error by the machine, must we surrender like an inferior species, not daring to contradict the fruit of its (supposed) evolution?