We can certainly foresee a future, one the uncharitable might call dystopian, in which all the humans have been barcoded with purpose & capability metadata so that AIs can process them more efficiently.
Might be what'll happen. We could've been reaping the benefits of and/or living the dystopia of that today, or even 10 years ago, were the decision made to actually barcode everyone. But we didn't, and what's likely to happen is we'll push the biometrics recognition technologies to such high level, the machines will no longer need the barcodes. Then the dystopia will happen anyway.
Note the irony here: what people don't want is the dystopia, but what's stopping it now is that they find barcoding people creepy. They won't notice the AI tech until it's too late.
On a broader note, this pattern of rounding a square peg to fit if we can't square the round hole - it's what we do. All the time, everywhere. For instance, designing a reliable all-terrain vehicle is something that technologically escapes now even to this day, but thousands of years ago our ancestors figured out that if they flatten and pave the terrain, then a simple wheel would do.
It's ironic, especially when the obvious engineering solution would be to add tracking paint/sigils on the ball... and doubly ironic when the engineering solution would be unlikely to be accepted.
Only ironic to software developers. The engineers who produced the ball understand that changing the properties of the ball in that way would reflect in the aerodynamic properties of the ball, which gets fixed at the start of competition.
It’s not hard to fix your software that you created. It’s much harder to get global consensus on a change that wasn’t required before your buggy code was released into the wild.
They did this for Goal Line Technology (put a chip in the ball).
A few companies actually managed to get a production process that put a chip in the ball without affecting flight characteristics (there are a lot of regulations around this), and these balls were used in competition once (Club World Cup 2012).
Ironically, the most complicated bit is the sensors in the posts.
