Let’s face it, sports-judging is an oxymoron. We judge child pageants, pie bake-offs, we even judge rich malty microbrews—but judging sport, any sport, crosses the sacred line that divides the objective from the subjective. Or rather, divides the athletic endeavor from the beauty contest.

The UFC started in 1993 with few rules, no time limits, and no judging. Two years later, at UFC 5, Royce Gracie battled Ken Shamrock for 36 minutes. Longest bout in UFC history, and because there were no judges, it ended in a draw.

That’s a lot of drama for no finale. Understandably, the crowd hissed and jeered. Nearly rioted.

Same thing at UFC 7, where Shamrock fought Oleg Taktarov for 33 minutes, ending in another draw.

Clearly this had to stop. Enter the judges.

Of course, as with any system there were problems—specifically humans and their wretched subjectivity. Bad decisions piled up and Don’t leave it to the judges became the mantra.

Come 2001, the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board drafted the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts in an attempt to spell out scoring criteria that minimized personal tastes, feelings, prejudices, and flat-out ignorance regarding the sport. After all, how many willing and able MMA judges existed at the turn of the millennia?

That’s a rhetorical question, as in, who knows?—but the answer must be not many, because a decade later the sport still suffers from abysmal judging. “It kills my business,” UFC President Dana White complained last year. “People think that it's us. A lot of people aren't educated on the fact that the Nevada State Athletic Commission actually picks these people and allows them to keep judging fights.”

It’s mind-boggling that a billion-dollar industry is held hostage by government bureaucrats’ refusal to implement meaningful standards for judges. I’m not talking judging standards; I’m talking standards for judges. Like, Okay, all you applicants, come step on this scale. Now demonstrate a hook kick. A d’arce choke from half-guard. A knee-bar.

Can’t pass the test? Oh well, I think the county fair is hiring.

Given the technical nature of grappling—e.g., the difficulty in gauging an attempted submission during a scramble—it’s inexcusable for anyone with less than a purple belt in jiu-jitsu to judge fights. That’s why the scorecards often reflect undue weight given to late-round takedowns.

And it’s why the Unified Rules keep evolving, adding more and more specific scoring standards. Here’s a sampling of the 2012 changes:

No points for defense, only offense.

Striking and grappling are given equal weight.

Heavier strikes are given more weight than the number of strikes landed.

These grappling moves shall be scored heavily: takedowns, reversals, submissions, transitions, activity and threatening moves from the fighter on the bottom and attempted submissions that lead to the threatened fighter being tired.

Effective aggression is now defined as a fighter moving forward and using legal techniques. Attacking with submissions or ground strikes included.

Octagon Control is now defined as a fighter dictating pace and position of the fight.

These continuing changes are really an attempt to throttle human subjectivity from the process.However, the standards are meaningless if the state athletic commissions refuse to axe judges who can’t/won’t implement the criteria. It’s a quandary that could continue for decades—but we may already have the solution.

Enter Fightmetric. Backstage at every UFC event a team of joystick jockeys hunch before monitors and mash controllers as the action unfolds. Kicks, jabs, body-shots--there’s a button for each. In real-time a computer displays the stats on monitors in front of commentators Joe Rogan and Mike Goldberg, and also in the production trailer for the broadcast. Meanwhile, a proprietary algorithm compiles the cumulative score, for which I’ll defer to the official Fightmetric explanation:

The Total Performance Rating (TPR) is a statistic used to measure the quality of a fighter’s performance. Scored on a scale between 0-100, TPR provides an easy way to measure and compare performance in any single fight, whether 30 seconds or 30 minutes long. Consider TPR to be for MMA fighters what the NFL’s Passer Rating is for quarterbacks.

Imagine, no more cageside judges. Just an NSA-style bunker filled with pimply teens and wall-to-wall monitors. If it’s good enough for flying drones halfway across the globe and firing missiles into crowded villages, it should suffice for a mixed martial arts fight, right?

Better than tweaking, bending, and adhering more Band-Aids on a broken machine. Economists call that chasing sunk costs, and it’s the favored blindspot of inefficient governments, bloated businesses, and compulsive gamblers.

Sometimes the only way to fix something is to huck it in the dumpster.

But don’t stop there. We should ditch the judges and the joystick jockeys. Completely eliminate humans from the equation. It’s possible. If today we start working with EA Sports to develop a collision-detection system, in a few years the Artificial Intelligence will catch up and recognize and compile strikes and grappling moves, and coupled with the TPR algorithm, voila!--no more subjectivity.

Sounds farfetched, but we’re on the backside of a technology tsunami. Consider texting. Barely existed last decade, and now kids can film and edit a feature movie on their toy phones. We used to gaze ahead 10, 15 years and predict the tech. But that’s no longer possible.

The only certain bet is uncertainty, and that a good portion of us will cling to our antiquated notions of human labor. Notions that were critical to agrarian and industrial societies: When in doubt, work harder… The devil will find work for idle hands …

I can already hear the scoffing. This is ridiculous, we’re not gonna replace judges with machines. Well, that’s what ole John Henry thought at the turn of the century when he sweat and swung his sledgehammer to dig that famed railroad tunnel faster than his nemesis, a new steam-powered jackhammer. Though Henry won, at the finish line he held his chest and keeled over.

Sentimentality is always the first casualty of progress.

In Race Against the Machine, authors Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, both MIT researchers, parse the data and deduce that current technology could eliminate 47% of current jobs. Other estimates peg job elimination at 70% through the next 50 years.

If this sounds like a bad sci-fi movie, look around: DIY accounting software. Self-checkout stands. Internet bots writing articles and books. Warehouse robots. ATM machines. Desktop dictation. Wikipedia. Self-driving cars.

We now stand at a fork in the road, and the signs point to either utopian or dystopian futures.Do nothing and we continue down the low road leading to third-world status: where technology progresses exponentially, jobs erode, and the middle class shrinks. And shrinks and shrinks. Fueling that cycle is the economy’s dependence on middle-class spending. Less spending equals greater pressure on businesses to automate and cut labor costs. Lower labor means less consumer spending, etc.

In a capitalist society money is the primary means of spurring human productivity. But now the question isn’t should we eliminate clerks, secretaries, lawyers, writers, baristas, doctors, nurses, truck drivers, air traffic controllers, and even MMA judges—that’s already happening—the question is how we divide the pie when their labor is no longer required.

“In the not too long, I think within the lifetimes of most of the people in this room, we are going to transition into an economy that is very productive but that just doesn't need a lot of human workers,” MIT digital business research scientist Andrew McAfee told an audience during his recent Tedx talk. “And managing that transition is going to be the greatest challenge that our society faces.”

The greatest challenge?

Yes.

Because choosing the high road requires work, but even more difficult, a massive paradigm shift. Think of America as a giant cult brainwashing us from kindergarten to the grave. That indoctrination and reinforcement is necessary—born into a Monopoly game where 95% of the property is already owned, the only way to quell mutiny is to demonize competing ideologies--and lionize the rare lucky that achieve enlightenment via mad-wealth.

As Tyler Durden, the anti-hero of Fight Club, laments: “We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

But leaving a cult ain’t so easy. Defect and the devotees swarm and judge you quick. Recall Senator Joseph McCarthy’s commie witch trials in the 50s. The Hollywood blacklist. The big bad Red Scare.

So, um, to rap this up, I guess to get rid of human judges we need to quit judging, um, lest we be judged?

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