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Why don’t we want more “accuracy” at the ballpark – or in the courtroom?
It’s baseball season again, and that means it’s time again to embrace the chronic self-harm of being a Mets fan (already off to a stellar 1-6 start), but also, this year especially, to ponder the ways in which technology risks making some things worse by making other things better.
That’s because this season was originally supposed to be the one where Major League Baseball began introducing robot umpires to call balls and strikes. The idea was to use new technology to make an old game more perfect, less arbitrary, more objective.
But after a few seasons of trials in the minor leagues, the robots’ march to the Majors slowed. It turns out, players and managers weren’t as thrilled about putting about Hal 9000 behind the plate as MLB thought.
The challenges of defining an objective and consistent strike zone, and the misgivings about removing human judgment altogether, have pushed back the robots’ debut for at least another season – if not more.
To be up front, I think that’s a good thing. Maybe I’m just yelling at clouds here, but to me the subtle arbitrariness of a strike zone – unlike, say, the objective reality of a safe/out call – is an intrinsic part of the short story that is a baseball game.
But all of this got me thinking about another more consequential area where people’s appetite for technological “accuracy” is milder than you’d think: the courtroom.
Of all the institutions in a democracy, judges and courts have perhaps the highest duty to be – and to be seen as – impartial. And yet a growing number of Americans no longer see the bench that way. Overall, fewer than 50% of Americans say they trust the judicial branch of the federal government, the lowest mark on record, and only half of Americans say criminal suspects are treated “fairly” – down from roughly two-thirds at the turn of the century.
Each side has its grievances. For many Republicans, the Biden administration has co-opted the courts as part of a banana republic style bid to sideline Trump with frivolous legal charges. Democrats, meanwhile, see the Supreme Court as hopelessly illegitimate and biased because Trump gave it an overtly conservative majority that, as anticipated, rolled back Roe v. Wade.
Can technology help? In one small corner of the justice system at least, it seems so. For several years now, AI programs have been used to assist judges in specific areas – such as determining bail – where machine learning can use vast amounts of past data to make predictions about future behavior.
America already jails more people than any country on earth, and fully a quarter of those in prison are merely awaiting trial, often for months at a time. But studies show that AI can improve things.
In one survey from 2017, an AI program was 25% more accurate than human judges when it came to predicting whether suspects released on bail would flee or commit more crimes. Using AI would also, the study found, have safely reduced the pretrial prison population by some 40%. Several states have found that using algorithms can help reduce pre-trial prison populations without an increase in crime.
That’s all good. But there’s one problem: People in general still don’t seem to want robots in the courtroom. A YouGov study from last year showed that barely 1 in 5 Americans thought a robot would “be a better judge,” while 56% preferred a “human who can use their emotion and instinct.” A broad survey of judges and other court workers found that two thirds were skeptical about using AI in the courtroom, citing concerns about accuracy and emotional intelligence.
There are, of course, problems with AI in criminal justice. One is the risk of bias. After all, if AI is what it eats, then training AI modules on decades of policing and court data shaped by systemic racial or socio-economic biases risks teaching robots to amplify them further. The ACLU has highlighted this problem in algorithms used for policing and pre-trial detention.
Another issue is transparency. These algorithms are a black box – private sector trade secrets guarded as closely by tech companies as KFC protects its spice recipe or Coke guards its formula. If a computer decides to jail you, you’d probably never know why – was it an AI hallucination that shipped you off to Rikers Island?
But a big issue is more basic: People just aren’t comfortable with a box of ones and zeros making decisions that depend on assessments of our character, our emotions, or humanity. There’s a kind of alienation there that people aren’t comfortable with, even if the accuracy is greater and the societal benefits can be modeled.
The problem is a delicate one. On the one hand, if we’re forgoing real improvements – fewer people in jail and safer streets at the same time – we are needlessly harming large numbers of people over a mistaken belief in the ability of people to judge other people fairly.
But in a deeply polarized and increasingly mistrustful society, introducing technologies that aim to make our institutions more accurate may also, paradoxically, cause people to trust them less.
Let me know what you think about robots at the ballpark or in the courtroom here – if you include your name and city, we may run your response in a future edition of the GZERO Daily newsletter.
Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers and his interpreter Ippei Mizuhara watch Major League Baseball's season-opening game against the San Diego Padres at Seoul's Gocheok Sky Dome on March 20, 2024
Hard Numbers: Curveball drama, Development & the deep blue sea, Turkey hikes rates, Somali pirates plot comeback
4.5 million: At least $4.5 million in wire transfers sent from the bank account of American baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani has reportedly ended up with a California bookmaker now under federal investigation. Ippei Mizuhara, Ohtani’s longtime friend and interpreter, says the ballplayer was generously paying off Mizuhara’s gambling debt. A day later, Ohtani’s lawyer claimed Mizuhara had robbed his client. Stay tuned.
2: In competition with China, Russia, and others to reach large deposits of cobalt, nickel, copper, and manganese buried beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean, India has applied to the UN-affiliated International Seabed Authority for two new deep-sea exploration licenses. (India already has two others. China has five total, and Russia has four.) These minerals are essential for the development of solar and wind power, electric vehicles, and battery technology.
5: Turkey’s Central Bank surprised just about everyone on Thursday by raising its main interest rate by 5 percentage points to 50%. The move comes ahead of important local elections on March 31, signaling that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is allowing central banker Mehmet Simsek to set rates without political interference.
20: As Yemen’s Houthis make headlines by firing on shipping hundreds of miles to the north to protest Israel’s operations in Gaza, Somali pirates are using the distraction to stage a comeback. They’ve launched at least 20 attempted ship hijackings since November, once again driving up shipping costs.
Fmr. U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks on the day of his court appearance in New York after being indicted by a Manhattan grand jury. Photo taken in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., April 4, 2023.
Hard Numbers: Trump leads early, NPR & PBS quit Twitter, stopgap for Darien, global warming juices baseballs
49.3: FiveThirtyEight launched its national polling averages for the 2024 Republican presidential race this week, and Donald Trump leads the pack with 49.3% support. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis trails well behind with 26.2%, while fmr. VP Mike Pence and fmr. UN ambassador Nikki Haley are at 5.8% and 4.3%, respectively. Research finds that national polls done a year ahead of the election can reasonably predict the nominee.
2: NPR will stop posting on Twitter, becoming the first major outlet to ditch the bluebird since the platform began labeling news orgs that receive government funding as “state-affiliated media.” That designation is normally applied to outlets in autocratic countries that allow no editorial independence. Twitter CEO Elon Musk recently told the BBC (another “state-affiliated” media outlet) that he may change the label to “publicly funded.” PBS followed NPR's lead on Wednesday, so two major US media outlets have now said "bye-bye birdie."
88,000: The US, Panama, and Colombia are launching a two-month campaign to stem the northward flow of migrants across the perilous Darien Gap, which spans the Colombian-Panamanian border. Since January, more than 88,000 people have braved the crossing, over six times the number from the same period last year.
1: Did the Sports Almanac account for this? A recent study analyzing the past six decades of baseball and temperature data finds that thinner air from global warming accounted for 1% of home runs from 2010-2019. The number is expected to jump to 10% by 2100 – though the data is inconclusive on whether this can help the Mets.
Uncertainties of COVID vaccine rollout timing; US-Russia under Biden
Ian Bremmer shares his perspective on global politics on this week's World In (More Than) 60 Seconds:
Number one, what will COVID vaccine distribution look like in the United States and elsewhere?
Very politicized, right? I mean, the fact is that there's an effort to have a distribution to medium and low-income countries. $38 billion requested, one fourth funded at this point. It is so obvious we desperately need it. The money is not yet there. It's clear that the emerging markets are going to take a lot longer and the poorest countries are going to take a lot longer to get vaccines. Now, at least that's less of a disaster in some countries with very, very young people because it's all asymptomatic spread, very few people are actually dying or getting sick from coronavirus if you're in, let's say, a Sub-Saharan African country where the average age is 17 or 18.
But still, your ability to get travel back up and going and get supply chains back up and going in many emerging markets around the world means you want those vaccines. And they don't have the ability to pay for the shutdowns that they do in other places. So, Mexico right now, I mean, their explosion of cases looks a lot like what's happening in the United States. They should be locking Mexico City down according to their equivalent of the CDC and their guidelines. But they don't have the money for it. And so, as a consequence, they're just betting everything on the vaccine. So, we hope that they get out real fast.
The vaccines themselves, of course, look fantastic. And it's great to see people getting that shot in the arm, quite literally shot in the arm, for them, for their families, for their economies starting off in the UK, the United States, and very quickly Europe and the rest. I think that we need to recognize the uncertainties around exact timing. We know this is going to bring us back to normal. We know it's for the wealthy countries, it will be this year. But there's a huge difference between April and fall, especially in terms of how many businesses go out of business. And so, I think, because we're talking about massive amounts of production that needs to go right with only a couple of companies that are involved in it for the contracts that need to be fulfilled, with distribution that happens across many states with different political capacity and orientation, different rule sets, I mean, I think that the initial rollout for the people that are most vulnerable will go well. And that is really important because they are the ones that are most likely to get really sick and die.
And so, by February, by March, mortality rates, even with limited distribution, are going to be a fraction of what they are right now. Probably about, I could see one 10th by the end of first quarter. But then going from there to do we all have vaccines and are we able to go back out and travel and socialize and get entertainment? I think there's a pretty big gap of three, nine months, depending on how effective the rollout is, the infrastructure is, as well as how many people believe that they should actually take the vaccine. The numbers have gone up recently, but mostly, actually, among Democrats. Republicans still very skeptical.
We need both parties to come together in terms of the vaccine and hopefully not have blamesmanship. The worse the rollout is, the more you're also going to see political fragmentation that makes it worse. There'll be less of that in Europe, in my view. But still there. Anti-vax sentiment in France is even higher than the United States. Russia is even higher than in both places. And by the way, given the nature of the Sputnik V vaccine, that's probably reasonable. But that's where we are. So, a lot to watch. Absolutely critical for 2021.
Vladimir Putin, speaking of Russia, Vladimir Putin finally congratulated Joe Biden. What will the United States-Russia relationship look like under a Biden presidency?
By the way, so did Mitch McConnell. I don't know if he congratulated him, but he did refer to Biden as the president-elect. So now that we've actually had the electoral college vote, and yes, it's the same 306 electoral votes as we knew sort of right after the election. It's been a month; it took a long time. The US Russia relationship looks more problematic under a Biden presidency, in part because of these major cyber attacks that we've just seen. Those cyber attacks against, first, we knew commerce and treasury, but now also defense and homeland security. This is a major, major effort by the Russian government and ordered by the Russian government that reflects massive espionage success in the United States and will undermine the ability of the United States to conduct its own intelligence capabilities inside Russia. How broad that goes, it will take us a long time to find out.
But certainly, it will lead to more sanctions from the United States against Russia. The mutual recrimination, the lack of trust, the willingness of the Russians to try to undermine US interests, legitimacy, domestic institutions, you name it, the transatlantic relationship, that's just going to persist under Putin, who has no real threats to his leadership in his country and who blames the United States for the decline that Russia is in. So, I do think it's going to get worse. And given the willingness of the Russians to engage in these kinds of attacks that are obviously represent a level of risk, it's pretty significant, it's pretty dangerous. Having said all of that, the US engages in cyber attacks against Russia too all the time. So, let's not pretend that this isn't tit for tat. The Americans don't accept that tit for tat because the Russians are so much less powerful, unequal. But we do need to put that in perspective in terms of what the Russians will do in response and how the Americans will respond.
I would also say that the fact that Biden will rejoin the Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement, would want to rejoin Open Skies if we hadn't started scrapping the surveillance planes, all of that does help, at the margins, normalize the relationship a little bit, even as it continues to be very, very sticky in a bunch of key areas.
Okay, let's talk baseball. The Cleveland _____?
Well, I mean, not my favorite team. You guys know I'm from Boston, so I still am very much a Red Sox fan. But they are no longer named the Indians. And I was kind of wondering, when you get rid of the Washington Redskins, why the Cleveland Indians were still kind of a thing. It seems like everything is going to move in the direction of let's no longer have Native Americans that are stylized as sports icons with all these people doing Tomahawk chops and generally disliked by the few remaining Native Americans in the United States for understandable reasons.
What do we want to name Cleveland? First of all, I like the fact that in Washington, it's just like the Washington football team. For the time being, it's kind of amusing. They've basically punted it, which is what you should do if you're a football team. If you're a baseball team, though, you can't punt, right? You got to come up with something pretty immediately. I've seen on the Internets, as they say, a few suggestions. The Cleveland Spiders kind of the old school favorite because they had a national league team back at the late 19th century. That's cute. But spiders, do you really want ... Spiders doesn't really sound like a baseball team. I'm not sure I would go there.
Maybe the Cleveland Guardians for the guardians for traffic statues on both ends of this major downtown Cleveland bridge. How about the Cleveland LeBrons, right? I mean, they lost him, but this way they could have him back. And maybe he'd visit and show up occasionally. He's done more for the Cleveland economy than anything else out there. And plus, he was multi-sport, right? I mean, the guy can do anything. He's not quite Bo, but he's close. So that's where I'm going. I'm going with the Cleveland LeBrons. I think that's where it should be. And then who cares how long he stays on the west coast.
What We're Watching: Brazilian ultras reject Bolsonaro, Syrian election "shocker", US baseball is back
The torcidasturn on Bolsonaro: Brazil's football fans, particularly the organized ultras popularly known as the torcidas, are famous around the world for the passion, intensity, insanity, and joy with which they celebrate their country's brand of the beautiful game. Brazil's president, Jair Bolsonaro, is widely known for the aggressive patriotism, hyper-masculinity, and man-of-the-people image he works to project. That's why some outside Brazil might assume that Brazil's hardcore football fans are major supporters of Bolsonaro, but that assumption ignores the fault lines particular to Brazil's political and sporting culture. In fact, ultras from some rival teams have joined forces in recent days to denounce Bolsonaro's approach to both crime (too heavy) and COVID-19 (too light). In part, this is because many Brazilian ultras are working-class supporters of the leftist Workers Party, the party that Bolsonaro bitterly opposed and then defeated in the last election. Many more low-income ultras live in favelas in Brazil's major cities, which have been especially hard-hit by the coronavirus.
Syria votes (sort of): Surprising precisely zero people, the Baath Party — led by President Bashar al-Assad — came in first in Syria's legislative elections on Sunday, winning 177 of the 250 seats up for grabs in parliament. In a country at war with itself for almost a decade, it should also come as no shocker that turnout barely reached 33 percent, down from 57 percent just four years ago — despite the government reopening polling stations in former rebel-held areas. The Syrian opposition denounced the result as a "farce" because most displaced people were not able to cast ballots, but that will matter little to the Baath Party, which has kept a stranglehold on power since a 1963 coup. The wider issue now is whether (or not) the ruling party will use its ample parliamentary majority to do something to help ordinary Syrians, who are coming under increasing pressure to make ends meet amid the country's economic implosion. Meanwhile, fresh US sanctions threaten to cut off Syria from some of the international funding it badly needs to rebuild its shattered economy and infrastructure.
US baseball opens in closed ballparks: Seventeen weeks late, Opening Day has finally arrived. It's a red-letter day for American sports as major league baseball opens a coronavirus-abbreviated season, in which cardboard photographs will replace human fans in the stands. Signalista Alex Kliment wants you to know (again) that the New York Mets will win this year's World Series. Signalista Willis Sparks wants you know that Kliment will be wrong about that for the 34th year in a row. There is also an election-year political angle here: Given poor approval numbers for President Trump's handling of the coronavirus, any perceived return to normal summertime life in America can offer a political boost. On the other hand, Washington DC's baseball club opted against having the president or a former baseball star throw out the ceremonial first pitch of their season: instead they chose infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci. "Normalcy" remains a relative concept. Play ball.
The Natural: Trump Takes the Field
President Trump renames the World Series to reflect a more #MAGA perspective, and then takes the field to face off against his own worst enemy. #mlb #Baseball #worldseries #immigration #kaepernick #trump