Major League Baseball is experimenting with robot umpires, reintroducing a device called an Automated Ball-Strike System in spring training games. Please, then, no more booing. How could a fan curse a machine? “Get new glasses, you four-eyed ABS?” Yet, why not, then, replace the Nine with an AI-equipped data cruncher to weigh legal precedents and constitutional minutiae? Robo-justices might call legal balls and strikes without errors.

The multi-camera ABS system is as simple as a Rube Goldberg contraption. As the Associated Press describes it, a “Hawk-Eye pose-tracking system of cameras installed to follow pitches and determine whether they are within a strike zone based on the height of each batter, who is measured without shoes before a team’s first test game.” For now the contraption is used in only a number of spring training games and only for challenging disputed calls.