Glitter trainers. It’s the first thing CA magazine notices as Professor Dame Wendy Hall steps from the taxi and into the hotel for her photoshoot. Her footwear is ice white, box fresh and sparkling in the sunshine. Turning to the photographer, no stranger to working with rock stars, she asks, “Have you met Paul McCartney?” 

McCartney, it seems, is a constant in the computer scientist’s life. When Hall went on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2014, she picked two Beatles records – Things We Said Today and her “castaway favourite” Let It Be (as well as telling the presenter her dream job would’ve been as a personal shopper had she not gone into science – which perhaps explains the trainers). “I was in love with Paul McCartney in 1964 when I was 12, when A Hard Day’s Night came out,” she explains. “I was too young to see the Beatles – but it has always been my greatest wish to meet him. Now he’s 83 and I’m 73…”

Should her dream come true, though, the two would have plenty to talk about. McCartney has been one of the music world’s most outspoken critics of government plans to let AI large language models train on their copyrighted material without paying for the privilege. “Make sure you protect the creative thinkers, the creative artists, or you’re not going to have them,” the former Beatle told the BBC.

“AI can enhance creativity but we need checks and balances in place,” Hall concurs, “Otherwise where’s the motivation for people to create?” She fears that, for now, governments are either too gung-ho, letting AI develop unhindered, or too cautious.

“What worries me,” she says, “is that we’re making all this progress in a regulation vacuum. We need to be responsible as citizens, tech companies and governments, because otherwise it’s just anarchy.

“AI will take the drudge out of life, but it doesn’t mean lots of people are going to become jobless. They will be able to do more advanced things while the AI does the routine stuff”

“We have a chance to get some governance in – like we have governance for nuclear weapons. Self-regulation won’t work – and Trump rescinded that anyway – and the EU AI Act is very heavy-handed and stifles innovation. The UK has the ability to sidestep this: we have a lot of skills in regulation and governance and people look to us as a soft power, so we are in a good position to coordinate this.”

Top table

And few would be better placed than Hall to assess the current state of play. She is currently Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton and Director of its Web Science Institute. In her illustrious career she has been President of the British Computer Society, a member of the UK Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology, co-Chair of the government’s AI review, the first UK AI Skills Champion and a member of the UN’s high-level AI advisory body.

Born in 1952 in west London, Hall’s background was comfortable, but not exceptionally so. “We didn’t have a lot of money,” she says. “My parents were very keen that my brother and I had a better start than they did. Education was everything.” She showed mathematical promise from the get-go, teaching maths to her classmates aged six, and was the first in her family to go to university. She rejected Cambridge for being “too stuffy”, and in 1971 began her 54-year-long relationship with the University of Southampton as a maths undergraduate, and then a postgrad. 

She returned to Southampton in 1984, working in the computer science group, setting up the pioneering Microcosm “hypermedia” system in the years before Tim Berners-Lee invented the worldwide web. She worked with Berners-Lee from the inception of the web through to the development of the Web Science Research Initiative some 20 years later, but it’s AI that currently absorbs most of her time. “Used right, it can change the world,” she says.

Reading the numbers

Hall will of course talk in detail about the impact of AI on finance and accountancy when she addresses the ICAS Annual Conference in November. It’s a sector she knows well – her father was an accountant, and ultimately FD at an engineering company, and she sees similarities in the technological changes he lived through.

“For most of his career there were still no calculators: everything was done by hand, every entry into the ledger. They had biros rather than quill or pencils, but still teams of people to do that work. It was very laborious: work had to be checked and double-checked. Then calculators were introduced in the ’80s, and then they became the computers.

“All those jobs have gone, but we have more jobs in the finance industry today than you can shake a stick at, right? The computers do the grunt work.

“Accountants are very clever people. They have a completely different view of the world to everybody else, and they see it through a spreadsheet. Now that was a major revolution when spreadsheets were invented – it made it easier to summarise, to present, to analyse, do multiple things across multiple accounts. But you still need the human being to interpret it. It’s similar today.

“History tells us that breakthroughs in technology lead to more jobs, not less, overall. There are always short-term winners and losers and we just need to get over this tipping point of when jobs start to go and before new ones are created.”

Hall is alert to the possibility that business will view AI as a cost-cutting tool. “Potentially, AI will change the whole workflow, which might change your whole business – just ‘one in, one out’ would be a knee-jerk reaction,” she says. “Using AI needs to be part of a well-thought-through plan. Cutting the workforce would be naive and short-sighted.”  

Better, she counsels, to regard AI as a fresh addition to the team. “See AI as a new colleague sitting at the table,” she says. “They’ll be able to do analysis across a lot of data instantly or measure competitors in your sector – work it would previously have taken a researcher weeks or even months to do. Use it as a tool for growing your business: to be able to immediately analyse the competition, look at your gaps and weaknesses, will be fantastic.”

What’s in a name?

But what to call this new member of the team? “We’re bound to anthropomorphise it and it’s very interesting to me to think about whether people give them male names or female names,” she says.

Hall herself is a proud feminist: “I started my career in the ’80s when my world was very male-dominated. There were very few people like me. I didn’t have children, instead I chose a career because there was no support for child-rearing back then.

“AI has been a bit like the games industry – the guys piled in right away. Women are using AI like they use the web, but they’re not part of its design or development and that needs to change”

“I’ve fought all my career to get more women into technology and now I’m fighting to get more women into AI, because I fiercely believe that while this technology is being used by the whole of society, there’s only a very small proportion of society that’s designing it. Men are running the big tech companies and doing the development.”

Women, she says, tend to be slow adopters: “AI has been a bit like the games industry – the guys just piled in right away. Women are using AI like they use the web, but they’re not part of its design or development and that needs to change.”

Hall talks about one of her mentors – the late computer scientist Professor Karen Spärck Jones, after whom the government’s new Spärck AI scholarship has been named. “I put her name forward, so I am really pleased about this,” she smiles. “She isn’t very well known but she invented IDF [inverse document frequency] – it was the basis of all the search engines that we know today.

“Karen used to say computing is too important to be left to men. That wasn’t a sexist remark. It was just saying women have to be involved as well, not just as users. I’ve changed that to ‘AI is too important to be left to men’. I’ve even had some T-shirts made.” Glitter trainers optional – for now.

online.southampton.ac.uk/courses/ma-artificial-intelligence

Professor Dame Wendy Hall will be in conversation with Dharshini David at the ICAS Annual Conference on 5 November. Book your tickets now

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