Best Of

Also we have signed two Danes but nobody from Sweden. Is AI biased against other Northern European nations?

Darren Drysdale?

New head of medical

Kone

Kone, Kone, Kone, Kone

Kone, Kone, Kone

Kone, Kone, Kone

I have no idea if any of the assumptions in the following are true but I’m just trying to think through how it could be possible.

Maybe there is a great wealth of data available on players from clubs based in Scandinavia where the majority of players are white; and a dearth of data on players from clubs based in Africa where the majority of players are black. This might lead to signing a higher proportion of white players than you would expect if the club had access to perfect information; and there would be no intentional discrimination anywhere in the process.

Again, this is a very one-sided view. There are concerns that AI algorithms may exhibit biases based on the data they have been trained on and the parameters specified by programmers, but AI also has the potential to be far more objective and fairer than humans, all of whom undoubtedly exhibit in-built unconscious biases (likely to a far greater extent).

Besides, we have signed Simons, who seems to be mixed race. And 5 out of the 6 players we released were white.

Moreover, I doubt you mentioned anything similar during the 2017-18 season when 8 of our 12 signings were black/African (Eze, Umerah, Moore, Thompson, Williams, Tyson, Ma-Kalambay, El-Abd). That was far more disproportionate to the general population than this January window, and those signings would likely have been made with more "human input"

If we win promotion, I think Kone will sign a new contract and won’t leave for anything less than mega money of £20 million plus. If we don’t win promotion think he goes for about £8 million.

In IT we call it something rather unsophisticated:

"shit in, shit out"

Basically if your models are fed on bad data they will have bad outcomes regardless of how clever they are.

Wonder if all players have all of the same measured data put in from the same age etc, so it is possible, but as above nowhere near as likely as under the traditional methods.

It's the same old argument with comedy clubs , TV programmes and previously schools, doctors etc. I don't see any racism, why does it matter as long as they are talented, funny, qualified etc. Short answer is it doesn't matter if you are a white male who is employed, it matters more if you are black, unemployed and either considered too temperamental or lazy or something else sloppy based on prejudice, or simply not considered for roles because John is mates with Billy from the rugby club. Representation of black players is actually pretty good but it stops at coaching generally for a variety of reasons.

I can see why people don't want to get into it on a football forum but people who are indignant it can't and doesn't ever happen are more worrying.

Of course it happens - I'm just fascinated as to how a numerically focused database is supposed to show bias towards players of a certain ethnicity. Discrimination at a human level, whether conscious or not, is a different matter.