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Are we sure that outsourcing judgments to machines is that novel?

Bureaucracy is a rule-bound system that, in the end, is designed to make decisions based on available choices in one context or another (deliver a service, access a fund, etc.). Are today's bureaucratic institutions any less of a machine than a computer algorithm, which is also rule bound (machine learning is merely a set of techniques for letting machines infer rules and, thereby, enable it to classify future observations).

Representative democracies are methods of outsourcing judgement, too. I neither have the expertise nor the time to, for example, make sound decisions about how best to allocate tax dollars to maintain clean water, pick up trash, hire the right educational administrators, etc. Instead, I vote for the people to whom I outsource those choices.

I'm also not sure that demoralization in the face of evidently unsound decision-making at the hands of a machine is novel, either (see Kafka on bureaucracy :)).

What I find most troublesome is that no one is questioning the authority of the machine's decision. One might argue that the same machine is used to judge balls & strikes for both team – so perhaps it's some sort of fair. But it's also evidently wrong – and not just technically wrong but, because of the authority placed in the machine, morally wrong.

In the case of human refs, there is at least someone with whom to argue and who recognizes you (the manager, say) as someone with whom they're arguing! Baseball has managed to make such arguments a spectacle, but at least those arguing recognize each other as people with whom they're arguing. Machines neither have self-recognition nor recognize others nor, consequently, argue (and change their decisions as a result).

So I'm ok with outsourcing judgement – for society to scale, individuals have to do that. But what's not ok is mindlessly outsourcing authority over decisions and, thereby, any ability to dialog and reason together.

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Yes, I'm with you on the ways we've outsourced judgment in the past, something I've written about just recently with regards to early 20th century bureaucracies. And, likewise, I've referred to liberal democracies as machines for the adjudication of political differences and conflicts. So the critique or questioning applies backwards as well. But I wonder whether the more explicitly technical or more obviously machine-like character of the new forms of automating judgement accounts for the evident willingness to accept their determinations. So, it's the form the outsourcing takes and the specific kinds of judgments that need to be explored.

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Have you written about the paper street level algorithms, probably my favorite contribution to this idea. https://hci.stanford.edu/publications/2019/streetlevelalgorithms/streetlevelalgorithms-chi2019.pdf

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No I haven't, thanks for posting it.

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Interesting, I wonder whether the modern corporation, as developed in the 20th century was the first form of artificial intelligence.

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One element of this complex assessment is the power dynamic. With a regular umpire, you might hope that there's some way to negotiate a bad call. The fans boo, the manager talks to him, there could be a video review, etc. With the context around this algorithm, it appears that the player is powerless to appeal an obvious mistake. It is like trying to get justice from a bureaucracy which is impossible to navigate through. The lack of procedural justice is part of why the outcome seems so wrong - though the outcome is also incorrect.

Another side of this: once the system gets better, it may acquire so much trust and power that even on close calls, we might start to revise our assessments to agree with the algorithm. This takes away another sense of agency and power: who am I to trust my eyes and judgment when the computer says otherwise? It has analyzed one hundred billion pitches, how could I know any better?

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Well put on both counts.

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Related to the power dynamic is lack of knowledge about how such a call is made. Generalizing, most algorithms are effectively black boxes to the end user. In the case of a machine learning algorithm, no one might know precisely on what basis it makes decisions. Which means there is no decision-chain or judgment to analyze (in real time, if at all), only a result.

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"...it appears that the player is powerless to appeal an obvious mistake."

With human umps&refs, challenging a call can have future effects. Not so with AI.

While a human also makes split second decisions, it has a witness function of its own that grades performance. If it was a close call, the next similar event might get "evened up".

This is readily apparent in a fast moving game like bball where the players have ongoing chatter with the refs about the event due to the likelihood that the same event will occur again soon.

Was reading the other day about the "shift" in baseball and its analytic reasoning. Better for the game? Not for me.

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Just to be clear, any future effect of challenging a call of "ball" or "strike" in baseball can only be indirect, since these calls cannot be overturned by appeal.

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This seems like a really important point and related to the original post on this sub-thread. Arguing a call cant' change it, but it can effect future calls. There's a symbiosis between the players and the ump to some degree where both might move or adjust. With the robot ump the movement is only way way, the players have to conform to the system.

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You could say this is hardly anything newer than the red light camera. But humor me as a longtime soccer fan who has had to debate this around VAR, but the entire concept rests on an implicit and largely false assumption about the existence of a single version of truth. Not to be a moral relativist about it, but is one perspective more "true" than another?

Sports tech rests on this belief that we can coldly and infinitely splice space and time to get a closer and more accurate representation of one singular truth (assuming one exists). This assumption is a lot more philosophical than beer-guzzling sports fans pause to notice.

In soccer VAR at least, there's a belief that more eyes and projected parallel lines bring us closer to a singular truth. But that truth is typically at slow-motion speeds (something that doesn't exist to begin with) and is examined from a non-human panopticon perspective, judged by viewers behind television screens who aren't even physically present as witnesses to the reality of what happened. And, to Alvin Noë's point, is there truly an objective truth free from an observer effect?

Slow-motion replays, for example, can make an illegal contact appear harder and more deliberate when compared to reality at normal speed without an intermediate screen. Is its truth any more valid than what fans in the stadium witnessed on the field? We act as if we believe it is, but it is dubious. Slow-motion replays can still be 50/50 and subject to interpretation, just as the dress can look yellow/white or blue/black depending on the observer.

Hence I've sided against VAR and instead embraced human fallibility as integral to the human experience of the event. Sports are played for humans at the stadium, not for cameras projecting to TVs thousands of miles away from the event.

In a broader sense, automation allows humans to outsource judgement but also ethics and even morality. The roots here really go back to anti-empirical Cartesian logic combined with Aristotelian zero-sum dualism: we wish for life to be a 1 or a 0. But the reality is much more quantum, typically holding multiple states of truth at the same time.

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Good points all around. I endorse this comment! Especially your observations about the desire for a singular "truthful" perspective and how this often means a perspective no human actually enjoys!

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I just ... prefer the game with the umpires. What is the role of that preference? When I think about my favorite baseball stories, many of them have to do with the human drama of the game, whether it's Lloyd McClendon going nuts at an umpire, Randall Simon hitting a mascot, Miami's "grand illusion" hidden ball trick in the CWS, Dock Ellis tripping balls on LSD while he pitches a no-hitter, Jason Giambi sharing his slump-busting gold thong with teammates...umpires and their fallibility are part of that drama. The game is already in trouble for becoming more mechanistic, more inflexibly directed at optimizing for specific pathways (spin rate, launch angle) -- which I've participated in and cheered in certain ways -- but anyway, I can go on about the baseball part, but the baseball part is just an example. What is the role of _preference_ -- because I wonder if we've lost any ability to really actively solicit and follow preference in these matters, many of which are subsumed under auspices of techne or otherwise fenced off from public questioning and democratic rule?

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I think this is a fair point and one that would get lost because it's hard to quantify what you describe although, I think, most fans would grant the value of these dynamics. Interestingly, some of these changes are pursued under the justification that this is actually what fans want. Whether that is generally true or not, I don't know.

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I’m a fiction writer and professor, and I taught a course last semester on “AI in Fiction.” Several my students developed a theory that when AI are “moral actors” we want to consider them people — with all the complexity that comes with that. But if they are disembodied or not human shaped, we don’t know how to yell in their face, so to say; we don’t know how to express our moral outrage. Culpability can’t find a home. So disembodied AIs that make moral decisions become godlike in the sense that they make decisions that can outrage our morality, and we are as powerless to argue with them as we are to argue with a volcano or hurricane.

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That's a helpful observation.

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This is, I think, a very interesting case study in what we as humans want in the sporting arena. Often these technologies are introduced to ensure that sporting justice is done - and indeed, accurate technologies (unlike this one!) would certainly ensure that, to the letter of the law, the correct result is achieved. Yet the fact that so many sporting fans and players find this so dissatisfactory (witness the outpouring of anger in the UK when VAR ruled scorers offside when they had infringed by the length of a big toe) suggests that what we really want is *human* justice to be done. We crave an arena where someone rules with justice and righteousness, even for a couple of hours - and that someone must be a Someone, a person to whom we can appeal, who understands the distinction between mechanical, automated "correct answers" and the more nuanced and contextually subtle concepts of fairness and justice.

I wrote on this a little last year (https://semperlectio.wordpress.com/2020/04/20/the-hallowed-turf/) and found this quote from Thomas Boswell helpful:

“Born to an age where horror has become commonplace, where tragedy has, by its monotonous repetition, become a parody of sorrow, we need to fence off a few parks where humans try to be fair, where skill has some hope of reward, where absurdity has a harder time than usual getting a ticket.”

The trouble with automated justice is that, precisely because it is automated, it is frequently absurd to the human observer or participant. In the rich human context of what is right and fair in a particular sport, conditioned by years of history and shared understand (often inarticulated, even if it were possible to be articulated), a technically "correct" decision might seem frankly ridiculous.

(While I have you - I'm teaching a course on the ethics of technology from a Christian perspective here in the UK, and I've found your insights superbly helpful. Thank you.)

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That should be "shared understanding" in the fourth paragraph.

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"Are there other goods that may be lost in the pursuit of accuracy?"

This raises the question: What exactly is the purpose of an umpire? Simply to be an accurate judge of the rules? This may seem like the only measure of good officiating in any sport. However, as someone who has officiated football and basketball, I can say that making accurate calls is only part of the job, and perhaps not even the most important part. Veteran officials often speak of "game management" as a critical part of doing the job well, and it is a big part of our evaluation as well. Game management means keeping the emotional tenor of the game in check by ensuring the appearance of fairness. This means that officials call every game differently, depending on the circumstances. Very emotional, physical games must be officiated more strictly, and I don't think fans realize how close these games come to devolving into pure chaos, if not for good game management by the officials. And yes, this also means makeup calls. All good officials make makeup calls because they know when they've made a bad call and they understand that accuracy must be balanced with fairness. But an algorithm doesn't know when it's made a bad call and therefore can't make up for it.

The truth is, accuracy and fairness are two very different things, and we are choosing to maximize one at the expense of the other, simply because accuracy is easier to quantify. It turns out that fairness, or justice, is very difficult to quantify, and any attempts to do so thus far have produced very questionable results. Look no further than the algorithms used to determine court sentencing, loan qualification, etc. I would argue that these algorithms aren't even attempting to quantify fairness. They are simply conflating it with accuracy, something that can be quantified. Of course, humans can make the same errors in judgment, but at least humans can be held accountable.

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Unlike the introduction of video review, submitting to the judgment of an automated system as the final arbiter of balls and strikes would fundamentally change the nature of baseball, precisely by undermining the authority structure in which it operates. Even when video review leads to calls being reversed on the field, the decision ultimately depends on the considered judgment of the umpire(s). In other words, video review leads to a kind of enhancement of judgment. With the automated strike zone, however, this judgement is entirely superceded by an algorithm, which replaces, rather than enhances judgment.

One important effect of this on the game will be a fundamental change in the meaning of "ball" and "strike." Although at first the algorithm will be adjusted to track, as best it can, what we now understand the strike zone to be, eventually the strike zone will be defined by whatever the algorithm determines. Which is more or less to say that the terms "ball" and "strike" will become meaningless, since they no longer correspond to any kind of human judgment about the nature of things.

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I really enjoyed this comment, but I think baseball is not a great example, because if the algorithm gets the strike zone wrong, it'll show (like in the video). Maybe Amazon or Netflix algorithms might be a better example, because we just follow the algorithm's judgment about what we want and don't pick for ourselves, and you'll never know what you might have wanted without the algorithm.

For sports, I think the enhanced judgment of video review was a bigger fundamental change, because it's so clunky and distracting, we're taking accuracy in sports too seriously. It's no fun to stop a game to examine a play down to such detail. It's not like autonomous driving or robot surgery, where accuracy saves lives. So while I'd prefer a human ump so we don't have to worry so much about perfection, I'd still prefer an automated system over video review, just so the calls happen quickly and don't drain the life out of big moments.

Another sports note - the Olympics had a shooting event that used lasers instead of bullets into a target. We can't see the result, we can only trust that the system detected the shot accurately. It feels similar, and it also looked like much less fun.

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Thanks for this response. I completely agree with you that we tend to take accuracy in sports too seriously, and that there should be more limits on the use of video review, for the sake of preserving the natural flow of the game. But I suspect that, once the ABS is fully integrated into the MLB, the change brought about by video review will seem somewhat superficial in comparison.

Let me explain: When we criticize an umpire for getting a call wrong, we are expressing a judgment that his determination of whether a particular pitch is a ball or strike fails to meet some sort of independent standard of what a ball or strike is. In other words, we are appealing to a shared understanding or definition of the strike zone to which the umpire's call is expected to conform.

With a universal automated system that has ultimate authority over a call, however, this dynamic will be lost. Once the technology is sufficiently fine-tuned so as to eliminate egregious errors, we will simply lose the sense of what we currently mean by it "getting the strike zone wrong," since what the algorythm decides will gradually supplant our "common sense" of what the strike zone is.

Of course, none of this is to say that the integration of ABS will cause the game to *look* substantially different than it does now. But it will, I think, make it *feel* substantially different to play.

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Yes, well put. The distinction between enhancing judgment and replacing judgment drawn from the example of vide review is especially helpful.

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The automated umpire is being used within a minor league game. Though the camera doesn't pan around enough to provide a glimpse into what the audience looks like in that clip, from what little had been filmed, doesn't seem like there were many audience members around. I don't know much about baseball, but audience seems to be an important differentiator between a major league game versus a minor league game. When anger turned to resignation, is resignation something humans bond over? Is it a 'sticky' emotion? Perhaps part of attending a game is to experience emotional ups and downs with another friend, a group of friends, or a crowd of fans. In a way, we sort of enjoy games because of these elements of surprise, the subjectivity of it all.

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Yes, this is a really interesting observation about how the emotional consequences are not just a matter of the individual player but also of the player-team-audience.

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"Are there other goods that may be lost in the pursuit of accuracy?";

We could play the game with robot players that could way outperform humans. What would the fun be in that. I am OK with the very limited mistakes that human umpires make in MLB. Also, it should be noted that younger umps call a much better zone than older ones. It has more to do with how they were trained (on a consistent vs. personal zone) and not eyesight. The problem of bad strike zones will continue to diminish as older umpires retire and newer umps with better zones come up. The need for the robots is continuously decreasing.

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Interesting. Did not know about that shift in training.

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Umpires used to be known for 'their' zones. Eric Gregg's was huge - google Eric Gregg livan Hernandez. Others were tight. Some called the high strike, some didn't. At some point in the past 25 years umpires were told, just call the book zone. Knees to letters, and it's gotta cross the plate. Look at the best called games vs. the worst. It's quite interesting!

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Yes, that's right, I remember Gregg and others. Interestingly, though, it still never quite seems to me to be quite to the letters. I wonder, too, just now about how the projected strike zone on the screens most of us watch baseball games on has effected how umpires call the games.

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"Does outsourcing judgment amount to an evasion of responsibility on the part of human beings?"

Getting into the weeds of automation is still new for me, but speaking from my current context (car sales), this is normal. For example, we do *some* of our service on site, but my managers send the vehicles out to a 3rd party site for an actual inspection. Reason? They say it's because of our workload, but it really boils down to them being able to go, "Well, so-and-so inspected it, and it passed," if there's a problem. So all of that to say: I wouldn't be surprised if the aforementioned question ends up being answered positively.

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Here's an interesting follow up sent to me by a reader. It's a twitter thread making the case that the pitch might, in fact, have been a strike. Take a look: https://twitter.com/RPimpsner/status/1413589635880660994?s=20. I still think the catcher's reaction suggests that it wasn't, which means, of course, that the played strike zone is not coterminous with the technically defined strike zone.

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This whole debate put me in mind of an Atlantic article from a few years ago: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/how-baseball-teaches-americans-about-law/600454/#anchor1b

The basic thesis of the article is that baseball, like many other games, is a school for life and for a particular kind of life. In particular, the author claims that "Baseball is the most legalistic sport in the world, and its actors—players and umpires—mirror the way citizens and judges interact in the real world of the law. By playing or watching baseball, Americans absorb an abiding respect for judges, courts, and the rule of law."

Might one of the implications of this technology be a change in the way we regard law? In the AI-umpire framework, law is not something in which we participate or which is properly rational -- one does not "reason with" an AI, one either commands it or submits to it. There is no participatory framework in which an AI umpire can participate.

I appreciated the other comments about how a human umpire, aware of his limitations, can try to compensate for his close calls in favor of one team by deciding that the next close call will favor the other team, and that this plays out as a result of the the interaction of fans, managers, players, and officials. This seems like a good school for a democracy governed by laws -- the people may petition for a redress of grievances, and yet there is a law which they acknowledge (e.g. the rule-defined strike zone).

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None of us know what it is like to not be part of the dominant species on the planet. This evolutionary step we are in will give us a taste of that humble pie. And it is not a knock on humans, some of my best friends are human, but it is not going to be pretty.

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"some of my best friends are human" ... nice line.

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Yes. Once actual machines are more accurate than human umpires they should replace them.

However, what if robots were better batters too?

Ultimately, the question is what would unlimited energy and limitlessly "productive" robots liberate us to do?

I thought that was the point of Marxism? The elimination of drudgery!

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Noë's questions are good ones, and they point to why there won't be such quiet submission to the authority of the machines as arbiters of an "objective reality." Baseball is just not that serious compared to something like COVID-19 or American Exceptionalism baked into real imperial armies, navies, and nuclear arsenals on a dying planet. In those contexts, the consensus reality is eventually asserted by body counts and sufficient pain to end all debate and fundamentally change millions of minds. Crude ballistics still trump rhetorical persuasion and algorithms, and behind it all is simply the rusty wire that holds the cork that keeps the anger in.

There are no bigger believers in an "objective reality" than people who believe they possess it and are deeply invested in using it to control others. Beyond relationships gone bad and the garden variety fundamentalist-dogmatist personality, internal to the ailing nation-states of the west we now have the entrenched divisions of the culture wars and politics that allow demonization of others to the point that a kind of civil war and slow-motion collapse is truly in effect, just without the traditional secession or mass revolt. A great bloodletting isn't necessary for catharsis and reconstitution of a shared social reality, but given past performance, western civilization prefers to do it that way. No robot can make it happen; humans will have to. Someone pushes a button or pulls a trigger.

It is really an ecumenical narcissism, this realism that tends toward the division of everyone into John Milton's "church of one." I suppose it is just the late acceleration of what has been going on since before his time. But it also has the effect of making everyone "wrong" if the "correct," good, or truly pragmatic view is to uphold a manifold of divergent but somehow collectively sustained social realities within sufficiently powerful narratives.

The Zugzwang of our predicament just gets deeper as we now have people insisting that willingness to live perhaps permanently within psychologically and socially destructive isolation is what "science" and their truth demands — and that to disagree is sociopathic. If you agree, you engage in destruction; if you disagree, you foment more — even if you don't wish to do harm and are simply living within different values and actuarial calculations with a different conclusion about "greatest harm." Still, you will be lumped with radical libertarians and people who have acutely paranoid conspiracy theories if you express non-orthodox views even while complying pragmatically with the frequently pointless genuflection of masking and second or third shots. Of course in many locales, the orthodoxy and hostilities are reversed.

As the virus turns out to be the new malaria of the north, we may have two camps of people dividing over how to live with it — one in an antisocial disembodied life not worth living in the views of others who often take foolhardy risks and behave irresponsibly. No centre will remain. Many self-lacerating absurdities will follow like employees fired and losing medical insurance for resisting vaccination despite also being required to work remotely from isolation. We have probably all heard the view expressed that the unorthodox should be hurried to their demise by refusing all care as the price of them refusing some care. It is like the practice of punishing students by temporarily exiling them from school or making prisoners' lives harder, or immiserating poor people for being poor. It is what one does — in Hell.

This insanely self-destructive logic also makes a florid appearance in the now universal belief that judges are and must be partial and partisan — or how all sides taken on the most vexed issues are toxic and compound each other for dividends of destruction. In Texas, the concoction of a law corrosive to the legal system that works like a curse — mocking the whole idea of the law and a judiciary — delegates its enforcement, like gun ownership, to any irritable bowel. A culture gone this far is full of these unfixable dirty logic bombs radiating lethal dilemmas.

But this is why I don't worry too much about quiet acquiescence to the machines, or at least not western ones. The death spiral is already here for the Abendlands. It's written into their founding stories and true names. Much of the west is in a Mexican standoff with itself — its own people and principles so why not expect it will all end like an Elizabethan revenge play? It seems to want to. That is the script when you run out of time and the plot comes to an abrupt end. In some sense, the shooting started a few generations ago in the US. The bodies have been falling steadily. It's sheer psychosis, spin, pride, and misplaced power that lets anyone believe this is a country in control of itself — or anything! — and that it deserves control. A sudden geopolitical shift seems overdetermined, maybe on par with the Russian Empire in 1905.

But, as Yogi Berra said, "Sometimes in baseball, you don't know nothing." We can hope to be surprised. But I do not expect to be.

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Baseball is broken. The commissioner is trying to change the fabric of the game. The owners are lining their pockets at the expense of player development, honest wages and the growth of the game. The players union only represents the game's superstars, while the middle class and minor leaguers are overlooked. Everything is just sad. Not only in baseball, but in every avenue of life do the plights of freedom and justice seem hopeless. There is little philosophy among the youth and practically no phronesis. It's enough to make one mad with wrath. I don't know how you all stay sane.

I don't know how to be happy. I want to blame society's ills for my personal shortcomings.

I don't really have any helpful observations or anything interesting to say. Jesus Christ is King of Kings. That's the only solace I can find when thinking about cultural criticism.

Go Royals!

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Just an attempt at clarification:

We ask about the objectivity of either of three categories of thing, roughly speaking: (1) things that have some sort of ability to get things right and wrong, (2) intentional things (generated by the first things) with representational purport, and (3) things that those first and second things can be right or wrong about.

Examples of things in the first category are a human ump and a robo ump; we might ask, "Is that human ump objective, i.e., free of bias, etc.? What about that robo ump?"

An example of 2 is the claim that a pitch was a strike; we might ask, "Is that claim objective, i.e., true?"

An example of 3 is the placement of a pitch; we might ask, "Was that objectively, i.e., actually, a strike, or did the catcher fool the ump with his framing?"

"Objectivity," then comes to slightly different things in these three cases. A definition of what category-1 objectivity is might differ from a definition of what category-3 objectivity is — the former will invoke the notion of a lack of bias, perhaps, which makes little sense to do when talking about category-3 objectivity.

But, of course, even though these modes of objectivity can be distinguished, they can be co-present and connected. For example, we might think that whether a category-2 thing is objective can depend on whether the category-1 thing that generates it is objective.

I hope this helps in getting clear on some of the questions we might ask ourselves about objectivity.

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The demoralized response from the hitter may come from having years of experience arguing with human umps. Maybe if he had come up with robot umps, he'd have a different response. Transitions are hard.

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Not entirely on topic, but what bothered me most about this video is the hilariously oblivious commentator who went on about nothing for thirty seconds before noticing that ball two had in fact been called strike three. There's a metaphor in there about our woefully impoverished Attention Society.

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I agree. In fact, there was much about the entire scene that I found demoralizing as I put myself in the shoes of various people. Obviously the batter, whose reaction I think we can all recognize from moments when we've felt completely defeated. (Out of curiosity I looked him up: Jordan Pacheco is a veteran player—he made it to the Major Leagues in 2011 but hasn't played in an MLB game since 2016. In other words, he's doggedly pursuing his goal against all expectation of success.) Now he finds himself subjected to the variability of the Atlantic League, an independent minor league that MLB uses as a guinea pig for potential rule/technology changes.

But not only the batter. What does this do to the umpires, who have been reduced to being the mouthpiece for a machine in the most visible part of their job (calling balls and strikes) but who still have to establish their authority on the field for all the other calls they make? And player, umpire, and fans alike were patronizingly subjected to the playing of "Let It Go" over the stadium sound system as Pacheco tried to have a human interaction with the umpire. (It's hard not to hear that song choice as an instance of the Borg Complex, even though the stadium employee who pressed the play button probably was just following their standard formula for keeping the fans entertained.)

So yes, I think I would say that this is a case where the correct solution is not a good one.

Epilogue: Pacheco retired from playing baseball on August 1.

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Ha! I did notice that as well.

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September 12, 2021
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Thanks for this. Glad to read the practices in your field, which seem perfectly reasonable and wise. And, yes, you're point about automation and rules is well-taken. As someone else noted above, the same applies to bureaucracies, which likewise seek to automate decision making through a system of rules. Thanks for the reading recommendations, as well. Your point about the source of "bad rules" is well taken, too.

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September 10, 2021
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I'm a Mets fan so that all my bad luck gets sucked up by their performance. :)

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