Posted by Yesterday, my youngest asked me to name my favourite poem and when I was her age, that GCSEs-coming-right up-in-two-months age, I would have said A Subaltern’s Love Song by John Betjeman.
I can still remember a wonderful English teacher, Mr Aspinall, a well-set, crumpled man in his shirt, tie and jacket, leaning against a filing cabinet substituting that day. He stroked his full beard as he read this joyful, joyful poem. I’d never heard anything like it. I didn’t know such poetry existed. It was so fun, so alive, so gently mocking an opulent lifestyle, whilst falling in love with it and Miss Joan Hunter-Dunn. It opened a door for me. I remember going home and being all excited about such poetry, and my dad going: That’s not poetry and quoted some Milton or Blake or someone like that, someone you have to work at.
Betjeman himself once said, his poetry was about places and faces. If we think about it though, what isn’t? All of life is about us understanding what makes people tick and finding our place in the world from the dysfunctional families in Greek mythology to the masses of data we collect daily. We all want to have a bit of an adventure, see some places and faces, which is why I love Betjeman and why I sat up straight for the first time in years in English that day. His poetry is accessible and understandable in ways other poems aren’t.
Coder or Croupier?
Fast forward nearly a decade from that day, I had a job as working night shifts as a waitress in a casino in Middlesbrough. I’d gotten back from Chambéry, France, after six months of being an AI postgraduate student and I was skint working the only job I could find in my hometown at short notice. Shifts started early evening and ended at 4 am and when I think back to that winter, I don’t remember seeing much daylight.
I’d been to a few other interviews at that point before landing back in the Boro – a programmer in Lausanne, Switzerland; a PhD student in Karlsruhe, Germany; a research associate in Aberystwyth, Wales. As I type this now, I am so impressed with young me, that I managed to get myself through the door to these various places. I’d never been on a plane before flying to Lyon six months earlier, and since then, I’d been hopping on and off trains across Europe to see the proverbial man about a job.
Once back in the Boro, it was harder to feel that freedom, especially without money, hence me working the nightshift. The WWW was still very much for academics, no one had it in their homes. I had to get myself into a university each time I wanted to check emails and job message boards. Everything else was still done by letter and telephone.
After a while, of not hearing back, except for a no from Karlsruhe, who wanted someone who already spoke German, it seemed unlikely that I would ever do anything else until at the casino, they said that I could eventually train to be a croupier. In my mind that meant working on a cruise ship or in a casino in Monte Carlo. This night waitressing was starting to look pretty good.
When I look back now at the choice: Coder or Croupier? I see that both options are appealing to me looking for adventure and fun – places and faces, across Europe. I wasn’t ready to settle down or any of that. I wanted to see a bit of life. Six weeks into my new night job, Lausanne called. Coder it was. Aberystwyth phoned me too, but I was already running across the snow-topped mountains in my mind, which were alive with the Sound of Music and AI. I forgot about my croupier dreams until the night I took the boat across Lake Geneva with friends to spend the evening at Evian Casino. I also did spend time in casinos in Monte Carlo and Las Vegas, during academic conferences. I hate casinos. They make me sad.
Lighting the fire
As I go through life and add things to my CV, the places and faces that might have been, get airbrushed out of history. But just before Christmas, I had an opportunity to walk right through my own life when I saw a job advert to become a Professor at a very old college, in the heart of London.
The truth of it is I applied so that I could dazzle myself. Sometimes, life gets tough and our natural joie de vivre fizzles out and we need to light the fire to get ourselves going again. Sometimes people with whom we resonate do it for us but, sometimes we need to do it for ourselves. As a woman over 40, I like many, am ignored and passed over and deemed irrelevant to society. Thankfully, this well-known fact is getting more traction because it is taught in GCSE Sociology, nowadays. Yes! Despite knowing this, occasionally, I need to be recognised and more importantly, I need to recognise myself to remember my joy.
One way to do this, is to sit in meditation to, as the yogis say, get a taste of oneself, but that can be hard work, especially if life has given you sustained trauma turning you into a version of yourself with ants in your pants, on red alert for far too long. So sometimes instead of twitching on my yoga mat, I apply for jobs to find a way back to myself, often I don’t even bother to send off the application as thankfully, some other gig without an interview and that trapped feeling will come along to save me.
This application was full-on but once I got started I enjoyed it. I had to write blurbs for 18 lectures with an overarching theme, list references, detail my social media reach, give links to recordings of lectures I’ve given, and a full CV including all those old academic dusty papers I’ve written. It was a lot of work and by the end of it I had a big package which I sent off. Their website isn’t great so I didn’t really get what they were on about but I thought I would deal with that later on. And I didn’t think I’d get to interview so what did it matter? However, I already give talks to the public and have been a university lecturer, so how different could it be?
One month later, I got an email and I opened it, thinking: Here we go, blah blah, thank you, but no, not at this time. Surprisingly, I was invited to interview and asked to give a 12-minute lecture and so I thought well perhaps times really are changing and they want someone like me.
I got the bus to interview and going into the place, I bumped into someone I sort of know, who told me that they would have shown me the ‘Great Hall’ but Important Professor Interviews were going on in there. This put me in mind of the scene in Ghostbusters (2016), when Erin, who is up for tenure, practises her lecture then bends over to wiggle her bum and chant: Teaching in the Big Hall, Big Day, before she is interrupted by someone wanting to find the Ghostbusters which eventually leads her to get a completely different job altogether.
Redeemed in the sight of the Law
Once in my Big Hall, Big Day, I gave a mini-version of my Bacon on Ice-cream talk on exactly how natural language processing doesn’t quite work and why it got withdrawn from the McDonald’s drive-thru in 2024 after three years of trials because it kept putting bacon on ice-cream.
After I delivered it, the panel looked at each other and said: Exactly 12 minutes. At which point I wanted to say: I lived in Switzerland, love, of course my time-keeping is fantastic. I didn’t, of course, as I was being Professor Ruth with blow-dried straight hair waiting to get my leg on the table, before resorting back to my natural hair-bear bunch look and suggesting that I dress up to match the theme of each lecture. I think Professor Ruth will have to join my society of the mind of Ruths.
As the interview went on, I began to see that I didn’t fit at all. I was like John Betjeman talking places and faces, but they were really after some Milton, something less accessible, something dryer, that people have to read more than once to get an appreciation. The current person in the job is not a computer scientist. They don’t code, don’t know how any of it works but present it in an academic way so it looks right but lacks meaning, depth and passion. Alas, for me, this place is missing a great opportunity because they are missing the point.
The point of talking to the public is to be more accessible and to do that you are not looking for people who may present a little differently but who knows how to sing your tune. You let people sing their own song. And, whilst they did acknowledge in their own way that by saying that they were trying to get more people in who weren’t 80 years old, and who were hoping to go to university, and the college wanted them to feel that they belonged, but alas they didn’t want to change to make any of that a reality. It’s great that this old college still exists and they could be forgiven if the panel members were all 500 years old too, oooh like vampires or demi-gods now that would have been cool, but they weren’t, and they weren’t as old as the college, so why were they behaving like they were?
I thought in that moment how amazed my Dad would have been to see me sitting there as he used to shake his head and wonder where I was from with all my hopes and dreams of places and faces and the confidence to be in places like that ‘Great Hall’ instead of doffing my cap and leaving it to the important people. And, this is the thing, when you grow up on a council estate, there are no expectations, none, so I have always been free. But then occasionally, I come up against established-thinking, who turn into my Dad and say: Your lectures don’t match up, which is why my husband shook his head and said: This is why you don’t write rejection letters like this, you just say, you didn’t get the job, goodbye. Stop getting personal. People get sued for less.
Thinking of my dad and my mam, for a minute I missed them very deeply and wished they could see me now, and in that moment of nostalgia, I said that I felt successful as I had lectured in the ‘Great Hall’ and this sentence was repeated back to in the letter I received saying I didn’t get the job. The cheeky bugger! I took it in the spirit in which I am sure it was written, like me Dad would have said: You did great, kidda, you did great. Because I did. For me, a good lecture tells a story and is relevant to those listening. This one had McDonald’s in it, a place where many people eat and it gave precise details about exactly how natural language processing works linking it back to McDonald’s with why and how it failed.
I can’t speak for the college, they obviously have a different criteria, but to me it looks like they are less worried about entertaining, and consequently, I doubt I will ever go there now I haven’t got the job. I want to be dazzled and surprised. I don’t want to slog my way through some boring slides as someone reads from them. I want them to speak to me directly, to acknowledge that I am in the room, that I count and they made this talk with me in mind, that is what I try to do in my talks. I hope they have chosen someone who does this, but sadly, I doubt it.
Professor McDazzle of McDonalds NLP
One amazing by-product of this was that I got in touch with one referee to ask permission to use him as a referee, and he very kindly sent me copies of his three latest books, after I said I was looking forward to them coming out. I felt like I had won the lottery and this made up for the fact that I didn’t get the job. I say job though it was literally six hours a year, but I would have loved it, dressing up as a robot in a McDonald’s outfit, calling myself Professor (Yes, I am Professor Stalker-Firth, yes, that’s right, with extra pepperoni, thank you), or would I? I think after a time I would have fizzled out a bit under a desire to fit in, and my talks would have been less fun, less accessible, less about places and faces, more needing to please and dazzle in the wrong way.
Would it have been worth it though to be redeemed in the sight of the law? Like Ruth, in the Book of Ruth, after all my name is Ruth. People often ask if I am affiliated with someone, and make their decision on whether I can come in or not based on the answer. I say the WI, but some people want me to be affiliated to something academic whereas I want to roll my eyes at them and tell them to eff right off, because I am enough as I am. I have the qualifications and the experience. I don’t need to be redeemed in the sight of the law.
Two days after my interview, in the big hall, big day, I gave the full Bacon on Ice-cream to the WI, I got to many relevant speech recognition examples that cannot be fixed by natural language-processing (NLP) used by McDonalds. One of the examples I used was the time I was in the House of Lords, talking about road bollocks because I don’t use the word bollard very often. Funnily enough, Jazz musician, George Melly was there that night too, so I’d obviously mixed him up with Viz’s Roger Melly, man on the telly, whose catchphrase was: Can I say bollocks? My mind was working in a much deeper fashion than I knew, much deeper than the deep learning which ultimately let down McDonalds. And that for me is the fascination of humans and computers and the unexpected turn technology takes because of people, which is something I had time to talk about in 45 minutes.
Thinking about it, if the NLP used a combination of retrieval augmented generation (RAG) which is when the deep learning looks to a smaller set of text, in this case, a McDonald’s menu, it might see that bacon doesn’t go with ice-cream, and ignore the small talk because only bollard goes with road. And, as bollocks is a bit sweary, a human has marked that up as a bad word in a supervised learning approach, or human reinforcement learning, which is why when I say it into WhatsApp it types it up like this: B********s.
For me, it’s never about the technology, it’s about the people. Who wants that job? The job of marking up the worst of humanity so the people in the Great Hall don’t have to know about it. For me technology reflects society and that is what we should be talking about.
Dazzled, affiliated, redeemed and elated
And, whilst I am disappointed, it has made me double-down on what I’m really about, which takes me back to the question of my favourite poem as me now, an older person, not about to sit my GCSES.
When my youngest asked me, I said as I often do, that it’s Derek Walcott’s Love after Love, which is a poem about loving yourself and how:
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door,
Because, once you love yourself, you belong to you and belonging belongs to you. No one decides if you belong somewhere, be it a great hall or in McDonalds, only you can decide. No one can do that for you. I have said for many years here that we all want to be seen, we all want to be heard and I used to think that we would do it by storytelling alone, but now I think it needs more, it needs a dialogue. We all need some sort of confirmation and acknowledgement which is what we get in a well-designed system, a system built on good human-computer interaction which isn’t as valued as it should be by other areas of computing.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that we are building lots of generative AI to give us seemingly intelligent answers which have no meaning and no heart, and are quite often just wrong, giving answers that you have to work really hard to change. We are being trained to feed the machine in the same way some of us have fed society for years, doffing our caps.
On top of which, we are introducing more systems to avoid interacting at all. We are keen to clean up and digitise the world instead of looking at it head on and fixing the problems in front of us. It is getting harder and harder to have an actual conversation with any place which is supposedly providing a service with all the layers of technology in the way.
And, so ultimately in my quest to become Professor Dazzlepants in the big hall, big day, I am more certain than ever that when I speak, I want to speak about creating technology that supports us appropriately to fix real world problems not academic ones. And this, begins with understanding ourselves, for technology is a mirror for us and I’m not enjoying what I’m seeing at what is being reflected back.
In the West, Enlightenment was a time with a distinct beginning and end when ‘enlightened men’ circulated their ideas in Great Halls and Masonic Lodges. In the East, enlightenment still begins by knowing, accepting and belonging to yourself, without beginning nor end, and knowing that by your noble birth, the sheer fact that you were born, your very existence matters and that quietly or loudly, you count. You make a difference to others the second you are born into this world and that is something that you should carry for all of your life. Sadly, society squashes that out of us and makes us feel that we need to change ourselves to be affiliated and redeemed.
I want to light a fire, a big one, so that everyone can draw closer and in that warmth dazzle themselves. So that they can take it out in and amongst the cold clank of technology that is not listening as it generates words that may look right but are ultimately without meaning, I want everyone, and I mean everyone, to feel their noble birth right and feel free to dazzle us all.
