The Robots are coming! The Robots are coming!
The robots are coming alright, but they’re coming for our jobs, and apparently they’re starting with the two professions that require the most questionable eyesight: baseball umpires and QuikTrip janitors.
Major League Baseball has been testing “robot umpires”—or as they’re officially called, the Automated Ball-Strike System, which sounds like something that would get you banned from a PTA meeting. The system uses cameras and computers to call balls and strikes with mathematical precision, eliminating the human element that has given us such beloved traditions as managers getting ejected while kicking dirt on home plate and fans screaming about strike zones from the safety of Section 304.
The technology works flawlessly, they say. Every pitch judged with cold, calculated accuracy. No more squinting. No more “framing” by catchers. No more arguing that the ball was “just painting the corner” when it was clearly in the other batter’s box. Just pure, emotionless efficiency.
There are, on average, 150 pitches in a baseball game that are judged to 96% accuracy by humans. Was this really the best we could spend our time on?
Why not focus on something way more important – the spot of the football by referees. There was a spot last week during the Chiefs game that had to have been a yard off taking away a Chiefs first down and making it third and one. This seems like low hanging fruit for the robots. But instead, we get baseball robots that can’t even sweep off a plate.
Speaking of cleaning floors, there is another robot that’s bugging me lately – the floor cleaning robot you’ll find at most QuikTrip stores now. It’s about a trash can-sized little robot with a screen on the front that displays huge eyes that sometimes blink. It’s a sleek, autonomous machine that glides through the aisles like a Roomba’s overachieving cousin, complete with flashing lights that scream, “Look at me! I’m the future!”
Except this particular future seems primarily concerned with creating the world’s most comprehensive slip-and-fall lawsuit opportunity. I’ve watched this mechanical marvel make multiple passes over the same tile, leaving behind a glistening sheen that transforms the beverage aisle into an ice rink. It doesn’t so much clean the floor as baptize it. I’ve seen people grab onto the iced tea machine for dear life, and I’m pretty sure I watched an elderly man involuntarily pirouette near the beef jerky display.
But here’s what really grinds my gears about our robot overlords: We were promised a different future. Remember? Robots were supposed to handle the mundane tasks efficiently so we could spend our days painting, writing poetry, and contemplating the meaning of existence. Instead, they’ve freed us up to work longer hours while simultaneously stealing all the creative jobs.
Want to create art? There’s an AI for that. Need to write a screenplay? ChatGPT’s got you covered. Hoping to pursue photography? Midjourney just generated 10,000 images in the time it took you to read this sentence. Deepfakes can now recreate your face saying things you never said, which is both terrifying and a fantastic alibi for that embarrassing video of me in Westport last weekend. But I digress.
Meanwhile, we’re all working overtime to afford the gas at the QuikTrip where the robot is busy converting the floor into a Slip ‘N Slide of sticky Coca-Cola syrup and slushie remnants.
So when that robot umpire calls strike three on your favorite player, just remember: we built a world where machines get to yell “Yer out!” while we shuffle back to our desks, dodging slippery floors.
(Get more from Chris Kamler on Twitter, where he is appropriately known as @chriskamler)
