For the many thousands of people whose lives were profoundly impacted by what football pundit Gary Neville called “the biggest moment in VAR history”, I can only offer the observation that feelings of unfairness and outrage tend to be built on the fantasy that life should, on some level, be fair.
This may come as scant consolation to those who felt aggrieved by the video assistant referee’s (VAR) decision to disallow a last-minute equaliser for West Ham United in their game against Arsenal on Sunday, but, in this instance, football is a metaphor for life. The pursuit of absolute fairness, justice, and even truth, is indeed an illusion.
The chalking off of West Ham’s goal on video evidence – it took more than four minutes and 17 replays before the decision was made – is of serious consequence to supporters of West Ham (they are now likely to be relegated), Tottenham Hotspur (they probably will not), Arsenal (they are now likely to win the Premier League title) and Manchester City (they probably will not).
Football supporters are not known for treating triumph and disaster with equanimity, but the followers of the clubs affected by this decision may want to reflect this morning on how our inability to tolerate injustice, or to live with the consequences of imperfect human judgement, has shaped a world in which technology changes the outcome of what people believe to be true. More than 60,000 people at the London Stadium, including the on-field referee, saw a goal being scored on Sunday; some four minutes later, they were told that they hadn’t.
We cannot really complain because we have invited this intervention. We seek to challenge anything we perceive (generally through our own prejudicial lens) to be wrong or unjust, whether it’s A-level results or the medical assessment of a doctor. No longer do we trust the experience and knowledge of experts who are entrusted to make judgements on our behalf, from football referees to High Court judges.
If the decision does not suit our purposes, it must be fallible, and there must be an AI application somewhere which will prove this. What’s more, we assume that if we show people enough evidence, they will then trust the conclusion. But this is patently untrue. Look at the multitude of opinions about that West Ham “goal”: a decision supposedly based on the application of unassailable and empirical fact is still debated, contested and deemed to be unsatisfactory (and not just by West Ham or Manchester City fans).
The fact is that technology can give us all the evidence we need – all the angles, replayed in high definition, beamed straight to referees watching on screens 20 miles across London – but it cannot really help us when humans are then left to interpret it.
In the end, of course, who really cares about the result of a football game? There is a much more fundamental point at issue here, one that goes to the core of modern politics: who – or indeed what – gets to decide on what is the truth? And, in the era of fake news and online misinformation, that is a central question of today’s world.
Donald Trump accuses the mainstream media of peddling falsehoods. News organisations accuse him of the same. With so many sources of information available to us, and so many ways in which “facts” can be manipulated, who or what can we really trust?
Politics, like football, is a game of opinions, and our settled resolution tends to reflect what we believed in the first place. Nevertheless, VAR purports to tell us the truth through technology. So why don’t we just accept its verdict and get on with the rest of our lives? Even if a lie detector told us that Trump was making it all up, lots of people would still believe him. Because, as it turns out, we distrust machines almost as much as we distrust human beings.
In any case, the essential point about the human condition remains. Life just ain’t fair. And maybe, in life, in politics, in football even, we just have to embrace the drama, and sometimes the iniquity, of imperfection.
Hence then, the article about the surprising life lesson we can learn from a niche technology britain hates was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( The surprising life lesson we can learn from a niche technology Britain hates )
Also on site :
- 'Euphoria' Shows Sydney Sweeney Masturbating and Topless on OnlyFans
- The domino effect: How Iran-Israel tensions arm pirates
- The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: What Is 'Omoggle'?