This post was originally published on Light Reading
If you are training to be a line judge in tennis – which presumably involves long hours hunched over, hands pincered around knees, staring at a strip of chalk as your eyes smart – you might want to reconsider. A sports footnote this past week in the AI-claims-jobs saga is that men’s professional tennis plans to drop them like a dud ball starting in 2025. Hawk-Eye, the computer-vision technology previously used for disputed calls, will replace human judges entirely, as it did briefly during lockdowns. It’s game, set and match to AI.
This move will percolate sideways and up in tennis officialdom, if not down, where line judges remain a rare, expensive luxury. The women’s game will follow, as it invariably does. Umpires, who may have risen through the ranks of line judging, will fear an AI changeover atop the laddered chair (they are also rarely used outside the biggest events). Meanwhile, ball boys and girls will eye Spot the robot dog, used at a Madrid tournament this week for security, with trepidation (because robot-dog security guards aren’t scary enough). An update with mandibles could put them out of summer jobs.
Few will cry for the tennis officials
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