(04-08-2025, 03:43 PM)MaroonBells Wrote: How long before some resourceful tech bro with a gambling habit hacks into the system and controls inches with a joystick?
Or ... one person in a dark room next door to the NY review room says the desired outcome ... and the machine does it and makes a fancy graphic proving that it's unquestionably true.
It's like the AI in Israel making decisions on which Palestinians deserve to be killed. Does it just say yes, because that's the correct answer or because it's the "correct" answer. Either way it puts the decision into a machine that you can't really audit (if you don't want to) and can't really blame. The people involved can just say, "The machine did it and the machine is always right, because people in lab coats made it and science and whatnot." or "It's AI, we don't really know how it works, but AI is smarter than people so how could we know?"
In a decently auditable system, it will need to spit out the machines results in real time. So let's say there's a controversy on a crucial 3rd down, you need to know what it calculated for the line of scrimmage before first down happened, to prove that the somebody didn't tell the machine the right answer and it fudged the original line of scrimmage to prove it was right at the end.
I guarantee you, it will be pretty snappy most of the time, and at some crucial point in time, it will take longer than normal for the machine to calculate a result. They'll probably put on a show, telling the players to back away from the ball so the cameras can see it better, and people will be like "The machine took too long, I bet they were rigging it." and someone will have to put out a video of where the ball was on first down and where it was after 3rd down, and trying to figure out if the machine was rigged or not.
Also, even assuming the ball has to be on the ground to be measured, I think they should really be analyzing how poorly the ref spots the ball in the situation where the player runs out of bounds, the sideline ref puts a ball on the ground by the sideline, they toss a different ball onto the field and try to place it at the same spot but on the hash, but sometimes they get that wrong. The machine should be perfectly capable of reading both of those balls positions and flagging if the 2nd ref was more than X inches off. Like if the center ref is a foot off, stop play and make him get it lined up right, unless it’s like 2 minute drill or something.
