The Perfect Call Conundrum

**Brian** (0:01)
Hey, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to another Saturday Conundrum. I'm Brian, one of the co-hosts of The Daily AI Show. And every Saturday, I bring you a brand new AI Conundrum to make you go, hmm, that's AI. Throwback for anybody around my age who probably remember what song that came from.
So anyway, what's this one about? Well, on Monday's show, we were having a discussion about the World Cup. We were having discussion, obviously, about AI, and Andy brought up a new story where he was saying the MLB baseball, if you don't know, Major League Baseball, I had prohibited the use of AI in the dugouts. And that got us into a conversation, Andy, Beth and myself, about the use of using AI or in the World Cup, VAR, who's offsides by a pinky, all the things. And I was saying, there's probably going to be some future state where it's possible, I don't know if we'll do it, but it'll be possible to, let's say in soccer, football, be able to track every single player on the field perfectly. No errors are missed, no fouls are missed, because instead of one or four referees watching everybody on the field, you've got like perfect AI vision, let's say. Let's just say, right? We're going to hypothetically say this could exist, or if somebody was intent enough, can build this today. Okay, like here's the conundrum, though. Like, this is the fun part about this conversation. Why I wanted this to be this week's conundrum is, think about that. Even if we have the ability to, across sports, basically use AI to make perfect calls, there's no such thing as getting away with something. There's no such thing as the ball being just outside the play, being called a strike.
The game is now played at a perfect level. There's no error, at least from the umpire, the referee, the referee, the referee, right? There's no error from their side.
Everybody has to play the same game. There's no variance. There's no, oh, it's only because that ref hates our team. They've always hated our team. We never get the calls, right? And so it brings up this really interesting conversation about, even if we can, and although there's a lot of positives to being able to take out errors, and it's cool because the two AI co-hosts you're about to hear talk about some historical use cases where blown calls made the difference between championships in some cases. So there's the one that doesn't matter on a Tuesday night, and then there's the one that could be the difference of winning the World Cup or not, not to say that's what happened this last weekend. So anyway, and then there's the other side that says, for everything that would be beneficial, the other side says, well, but is that what we want to do? Is that what fans want?
What is there left if you can't collectively wait with bated breath while the referee is getting the call in and then comes back out to the field to say that, you know, it either went your team's way or it didn't. And the roars and the cheers and the boos that all go with it, is that part of the sport experience? So it's just a really interesting conversation. It's perfectly time coming off the World Cup, but it's really about all sports. It's not just about that sport. I mean, we see it in tennis, we see it in baseball, we see it in football, we see it in, well, soccer, football, right? So I think it's a cool conversation. I think you're really gonna enjoy it. Whether you're a sports fan or not, I don't think it matters, because as they point out, you'll hear the two of us point out towards the end, it's bigger than sports. It has further reaching implications than just sports. So I really hope you enjoy this one. I had fun putting it together, and I love when good ideas just come out of the shows, and I go, oh, that's gonna be a good conundrum. So if you have a chance, go back and listen to Monday's episode. You can hear us talking about this idea coming to play. And here we are on Saturday, and you guys are hopefully getting a chance to enjoy it. Okay, enough from me.
You know what? I think I've done enough to explain both sides of this. I'm not even gonna read the conundrum intro. You guys got it. Let's kick it over to our two AI co-hosts to take us the rest of the way. Have a great Saturday.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:08)
Have you ever found yourself just absolutely screaming at a television screen because the referee blew a crucial game deciding call?