Do Androids Dream of Balls and Strikes?

How long before Major League Baseball just cuts to the chase and hires robots to call balls and strikes? The New York Times reports:

"An improved camera system to monitor umpires’ calls of balls and strikes will be used in all 30 major league stadiums starting opening day, ending the contentious QuesTec era but expanding the scope of baseball’s oversight program...The new system, called Zone Evaluation, relies on pitch-tracking data already collected by cameras in all 30 parks and distributed through applications on MLB.com and iTunes."

If Major League umpires are expected to mimic computer generated data when they call a ball or a strike, then why is a human necessary in the process at all? Why not just set up a laptop behind home plate and program it to flash a red light for a strike and a green light for a ball?

I pitched for my college team. Part of the strategy was to "know the umpire" -- each ump had his or her own strike zone aberrations. Was it occasionally frustrating? Yes, but the "human factor" is an essential part of baseball's charm. When an umpire blows a call, we are interested in it, we write about it, we talk about it, we lament it. Perfection is uninspiring.

Bring the humans back.