Why We Don’t Trust Technology

As anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m a big tennis fan, so Wimbledon is always one of the highlights of my year. Watching the tournament over the past few days has sparked an interesting reflection on trust and technology.

There was a moment at Wimbledon this week that perfectly captured our modern dilemma with technology.

Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova stood on Centre Court, disbelief on her face. Her opponent, Sonay Kartal, had just hit the ball long. It was visibly, clearly out. She saw it. The umpire saw it. The replay confirmed it. But the system, Wimbledon’s fully electronic line-calling, said nothing.

No call. No correction. Just silence.

Eventually, the point was replayed. Pavlyuchenkova lost it. She won the match in the end, but not before voicing what many watching at home were thinking: this feels wrong. Not just incorrect, but deeper than that... it felt unfair.

It later turned out the system had been manually switched off. A human error. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that once again, technology had crossed an invisible line, not of the court, but of trust.

Accuracy vs Fairness

What’s so interesting about this moment, and why it deserves more than a post-match soundbite, is how it speaks to a broader truth: we trust technology to be accurate, but we don’t necessarily trust it to be fair.

It’s not just in sport. AI tools can now detect cancers from scans more reliably than trained radiologists, and yet patients often still demand a second (human) opinion. We trust autopilot systems to fly planes, but hesitate at the idea of a driverless taxi. We let predictive AI systems reorder our shopping lists, but flinch at the idea of them deciding job candidates or court sentences.

Why?

Partly, it’s because fairness is more than just correctness. It’s contextual. It takes into account history, emotion, intention, identity. It flexes. And only humans, with all our messy biases, empathy, and lived experience, can really grasp that.

Which might explain why a player can accept a bad human decision with a shrug or a scream, but a perfectly accurate robotic decision feels… hollow.

Is It Just That It’s New?

It’s tempting to say this discomfort is temporary - that it’s just a matter of getting used to things.

After all, once upon a time we didn’t trust ATMs, or microwave ovens, or online banking. Today, we barely blink at those. So maybe our unease with AI is just a phase?

But I don’t think that’s the whole story. There’s something about this moment, about AI in particular, that makes the trust barrier more stubborn.

Technologies we’ve accepted over time tended to augment human decisions. AI, in contrast, increasingly replaces them. And when it does, it forces us to confront something uncomfortable: we are no longer the final decision-makers.

This is about agency as much as accuracy. Who gets to decide what’s fair? Who gets to challenge the decision? When a human makes a mistake, we know where to point. When a machine makes one, the lines blur - and with that, trust erodes.

Perfection is Boring

There’s also a more philosophical angle here. Sport, like life, is compelling because it’s imperfect.

Bad line calls. Lucky deflections. Human drama. These are part of the game. Would Maradona’s “Hand of God” goal have stood today? Almost certainly not. But would football history be richer without it?

When we automate judgement, we risk sanitising the chaos that makes sport, and life, so enthralling. We lose the drama, the injustice, the narrative. And maybe, deep down, we’re not ready to give that up.

Trust Is Earned, Not Programmed

Ultimately, our relationship with technology, and AI in particular, is entering a new phase. The question is no longer can it do it? but should it?

Trust won’t come from better algorithms alone. It will come from context, transparency, shared agency. From knowing that, even when technology helps make a decision, humans still frame the values around it.

Wimbledon’s silent line call wasn’t just a glitch. It was a reminder: trust is built on more than correctness.

It’s built on fairness. On perception. On story.