Technology was supposed to make our decisions more precise. Instead, it seems to have hollowed out our judgment itself. We have long believed that the answer is to ensure that there is always a human in the loop. Perhaps we need to think of inserting AI into the human loop.
Fourteen minutes into the FIFA World Cup group-stage football match between Qatar and Switzerland, the referee awarded Switzerland a penalty kick. Two Swiss players looked marginally offside in the build-up, but the video assistant referee (VAR) quickly checked the footage and cleared them. Breel Embolo went on to score a goal, and that should have been that.
But it was not. For the first time that day, the 3D animation that had accompanied every offside decision in the tournament was not visible to TV audiences, and fans began to suspect something was afoot. FIFA said that its semi-automated offside system had suffered “a brief technical outage.” When video evidence was produced 4 hours later, the lines had been drawn manually to justify the decision. This was just one in an avalanche of technical gaffes that have plagued the World Cup all the way to the end, from undetectable collisions with a spider cam to goals disallowed by VAR for incidents on the other end of the pitch.
The Tyranny of Precision
This was supposed to be the most precise World Cup ever. Dozens of cameras had been positioned to capture the action from multiple angles, several times a second—all in order to render decisions as accurately as possible. This has led to goals being disallowed by margins no wider than the toe of a football boot, but despite the technology, decisions have, if anything, been more fiercely contested than before. The fact is, the decisions that matter—offsides, handballs, red cards—have always been questions of judgement, and our insistence on precision has somehow made things worse.
The infrastructure of scrutiny tends to distort the very thing one is trying to observe. When researchers at KU Leuven tested this hypothesis by showing top referees the same fouls in real time and in slow motion, they found that slow-mo replays consistently attracted harsher decisions. When those who have experienced the entire passage of play in real time are forced to process incidents one frame at a time, from angles they could never have seen, they abandon the intuition of the moment for the narrative presented by the footage.
Judgment in Retreat
Despite my outrage, I don’t want this op-ed to be only about football and the technology that seems to be slowly ruining the Beautiful Game. After all, what is happening on the pitch in North America is just one example of the many ways in which automation is affecting our lives. Off the football field, loan officers defer to credit-scoring algorithms instead of their own judgment, just as recruiters use automated screening filters instead of reading applications themselves. Understaffed police departments prefer to rely on digital technologies (facial recognition systems and the like) rather than old-school detective work that has worked so far, while courts accustomed to CCTV footage and digital forensics have begun to assume that evidence from a machine is incontrovertible.
To be clear, this is precisely what we have been demanding for years. For a while now, we have complained that human judgment is failing us—that biased referees, inconsistent judges and prejudiced lenders were leading to unfair outcomes. We were convinced that algorithms would eliminate these inconsistencies because machines cannot be swayed, but what we did not realise was that when systems are engineered to eliminate human bias, they also degrade the judgment that is essential to decision-making.
Having identified the problem, governments have begun implementing measures to address it. Article 22 of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation gives individuals the right not to be subjected to purely automated decisions, while Article 14 of the EU’s AI Act requires high-risk systems to operate under human oversight. AI policies around the world (and here) have begun to insist that automated decision-making systems keep a human in the loop.
AI in the Human Loop
But if there is one thing this World Cup has shown us, it is that this is often ineffective. A referee in front of a pitch-side monitor is a human in the loop—who, when presented with freeze-frame evidence of an incident, rarely overrules what he has been shown. And this will only get worse when next-generation systems arrive. If cameras and sensors can marginalise human judgement in the face of mechanised precision, large language models will do so with confidence, delivering probabilistic determinations with a fluency and authority that will be impossible to question.
Instead of forswearing these technology solutions, we need to ensure they are designed to better meet our needs. Rather than insisting that automated systems have a human in the loop, we should ensure that it is automation that is inserted into the human loop. We should craft these systems to better inform our decisions while ensuring that the decisions themselves are solely ours to make. One way to do this is to ensure that referees, judges, loan officers and the like record their judgment before the machine’s output is revealed, using the machine only to test the decision, not to arrive at it. This is what forensic science calls sequential unmasking, a method designed to ensure examiners don’t see the ‘answer’ before they arrive at their finding.
The referee in the Switzerland-Qatar match made the right call. What the technology denied him was our belief that he had done so. Digital systems need to reassure us that judgment was fairly exercised, or risk consigning us to a world where we’re unsure if the decisions made were made for us.