[Bigdaddy]

I would wager that a AI/machine learning tool set could do a much better job of authenticating and grading cards than a human ever could. At a minimum, it would be more consistent than the current 'which grader got this submission?' system that we seem to have.
There are free apps for your iphone that can measure items, are you telling me that a system specifically designed to measure cards, in all three dimensions, would not be better than a human?
Look what computers are doing in solving crimes, tracing genealogy, facial recognition, image processing, etc. Cameras in the Dallas Cowboys stadium scan the crowd and identify areas where trouble may be brewing in the crowd by analyzing the dynamics of the people. Just today I read about Stanford researchers who used Google street view images (50 million of them) to predict local demographics and election voting patterns. The machines were able to process the images in approximately two weeks, where a human expert would have taken over 15 years. And that was just to classify the images, not to use that data to predict anything.
Now these machines are only as good as the software and sensors on them, but their ability to quickly process images and extract useful data from them is far beyond what a human can do. And they do it much quicker and more consistently.
Are they perfect? No. Is this an easy task? No. But it is one where machine vision along with AI/machine learning would make a tremendous leap in the card grading/authentication clap-trap that we have now.