John Guiver: tech, translations and storytelling

As the first engineer at a pioneering startup specializing in artificial intelligence, John Guiver’s expertise in mathematics and programming laid the groundwork for his technical career. While still working in this field, John began translating the memoirs of survivors of the 1972 Andes flight disaster, which led to the publication of his own book on the subject, entitled To Play the Game. 

Writing not only gave John a new creative outlet, but also a profound connection to the stories of resilience and survival that emerged from that tragedy.

John's early career as an engineer and mathematician set the stage for a unique perspective on creativity, one that blends analytical thinking with artistic expression. He recounts how his work in AI during its formative years required not only technical expertise but also a creative mindset to tackle complex problems and innovate within the field.

Visiting the site of the disaster, and translating the memoirs of crash survivors, not only connected him to a profound human experience but also instilled in him the confidence to pursue writing in a more personal and expressive way.

While researching the crash, John discovered a rich tapestry of interconnected lives and shared histories. This theme of community serves as a backdrop for his writing, as he seeks to honour the memories of those who perished while also celebrating the resilience of survivors. 

In this episode John also discusses the challenges of finding his voice as a writer and emphasizes the importance of perseverance in the writing process, sharing practical insights into his daily writing habits and how his experiences enriched both his book and his life. 

He encourages listeners to boldly pursue their passions, underscoring the importance of storytelling and connection in the creative journey. 

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Researched, edited and produced by Claire Waite Brown
Music: Day Trips by Ketsa Undercover / Ketsa Creative Commons License Free Music Archive - Ketsa - Day Trips
Artworks: Emily Portnoi emilyportnoi.co.uk
Photo: Ella Pallet

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Chapters

• 5:41 Education and early inspirations
• 11:35 AI in America
• 16:36 Interest in the 1972 Andes flight disaster
• 19:43 Research
• 26:05 Finding time and finding your voice
• 30:39 How writing affects other aspects of life
• 32:40 Future plans?
• 34:33 Connect with John Guiver

Transcript

0:33

I was hired as the first engineer in a small startup company which specialized in the type of technology that underlies all today's artificial intelligence. I consider actually in research and development. You're doing a lot of creative stuff. You're creating a new bit of mathematics or you're thinking figuring out how to solve a problem that no one's ever solved before. So I think there's a lot of creative juices need to get applied there. In the end, there were 16 survivors who'd been missing for 72 days on the mountain. I forced myself to write every day whether the writing was good or not. And I think that was very important because I was getting stuff down on paper and I might completely rewrite it later. Hi, I'm Claire, founder of Creativity Found a community for creative learners and educators connecting adults who want to find a creative outlet with the artists and crafters who can help them do so with workshops, courses, online events and kits. For this podcast, I chat with people who have found or refound their creativity as adults. We'll explore their childhood experiences of the arts, discuss how they came to the artistic practices they now love, and consider the barriers they may have experienced between the two. We'll also explore what it is that people value and gain from their newfound artistic pursuits and how their creative lives enrich their practical, necessary, everyday lives. This time I'm chatting with John Guiver. Hi John, how are you? Hi Claire. I'm very well, thank you. And you? I'm very well, thank you. Start by telling me how you started tapping into your creativity. Well, I assumed there you were talking about writing as opposed to my technical career, which I also consider a little bit creative. If we talk about writing, I really came very late to it. My main career was in the world of advanced technology and so really my only published writing was in the form of technical papers and conference journals and academic journals. So my first non technical published work was really in 2016. I was around 60 and I translated the memoirs of one of the survivors of the 1972 Andes flight disaster. And actually I'll talk later about how that came about, but it was a very pivotal moment for me because first of all it created a strong connection at a personal level with the story, the Andy story, but also because it convinced me I could write good prose. And actually doing a translation is a very interesting exercise for a would be authority because it's one where you don't have to come up with the ideas, but you do have to create good prose. So it's creative in the sense that you have to take what the author wrote in the original language and put it into good English and you have to do it in their voice. You know, if they're succinct or ingenuous or philosophical or sardonic or whatever, you have to try and capture that. So it's really about writing, but without having to come up with the original ideas. In fact, it's a very useful exercise, I think, for any. Any would be writer. And I followed that up with another translation, again from the same community of survivors of the Andes plane crash. And the second guy had a completely different way of telling his story. And so from these two very different source materials, I was able to, you know, write two very different accounts in the voice of the original authors. And it really helped me to hone my writing skills. And so that was really acted as a seed for when I embarked on writing my book to Play the Game, which was also about the Andes's flight disaster. But this time it was me who was doing the. The writing. I wasn't so worried about whether I could write decent prose. I was more worried about whether I could pull together this large amount of information in a cohesive way, in a way that was compelling to the reader, and to do it within the timeframe that I wanted to do it. Yeah, that's really interesting actually, because we often talk with people who have come to become authors in adulthood about finding a voice. So it's interesting to look at it from the point of view of your. Not just translating words, you're translating that author's voice and putting that across. You've talked a little bit about your career, but how were creative arts or creative activities, were they a part of your childhood? Were they encouraged at home or at school, whether writing or otherwise? I grew up in a small village on the Essex, Suffolk border, which a beautiful part of the uk. My father was third generation doctor, country doctor. The consulting rooms were in our house. But my mother is Italian. She actually celebrated her 98th birthday last week. And she studied English literature. And so certainly from that side of the family there was a great love of literature and she had a large number of books. And I learned to read at a very early age. I was a voracious reader. I mean, it was standard British Children's fair that I read Enid Blyton, C.S. lewis and stuff like that. And later Agatha Christie. I read as much Agatha Christie as I could. And that was certainly, you know, reading was certainly encouraged. My childhood was sort of rudely interrupted when I was sent away to boarding school at the age of eight. And I remember I did. I was someone who liked to write at the time. But I remember submitting some humorous poems in an assignment, an English assignment I had at school. It must have been age 10, and the teacher being very dismissive of them and chastising me for not taking the assignment seriously and so on. And I think when you're away at boarding school, I mean, it's great for learning how to be independent, to stand up for yourself, but you don't get that environment of encouragement that a family would bring. So who knows, maybe if I'd received that encouragement rather than that criticism at that age, maybe I would have gone on to be an author earlier. But as it was, I don't remember reading much literature at school other than what I had to do for coursework. And I think the formality of studying English literature really didn't appeal to me. You know, when I got out of school, I started reading Dostoevsky and various Russian authors and then I read a lot of Latin American literature, which I loved. And on and off over the years, I've gone through phases of reading a lot and then not reading so much, but very little in the way of writing other than technical writing. Yeah. Did you find subjects at school, at your boarding school? I feel so sorry for you, being told. There were some great times there. So it's not. It wasn't all bad. So what did you like? What subjects? Were there any that really grabbed you? Well, I was just passionate about mathematics. That was after a certain while, probably age 13 or 14, I suddenly sort of got mathematics. I understood its formalism. When I started on calculus, I was just very good at understanding it and doing the calculations. And later on, when I came to do my A levels, I was part of a small group who concentrated on mathematics. And it was a wonderful time. I just loved it. And, you know, after that there was an expectation. I go to university, I went to university. I studied pure mathematics at the University of Bristol. Loved it, Had a great time at university. And when I finished, I, you know, I felt more interest in going deeper and deeper into mathematics. And I continued on in graduate programs, first at University of Birmingham and then I moved to the States in 1978 and I pursued a PhD which I got in 1982. And then I returned to the UK and got my first sort of professional job as a technical engineer with British Aerospace in Bristol. And that was my first sort of foray into serious sort of work world. Yeah, yeah. Had you when you were doing pure mathematics doesn't sound applicable. Did you have ideas of what you wanted to do in the working world? I mean, that's an interesting thing because mathematics can be especially pure mathematics can be studied in isolation. And you do wonder, what on earth am I going to do with it? But actually it's a great basis for any technical career. And towards the end of my PhD, I started sort of moving more towards the engineering side of things. And I could have decided on a career in academia, but I really wanted to. I felt a little bit detached from the real world. I wanted to really be applying it. I didn't know quite what to expect. So I was just looking for technical jobs in, in general that required a bit of programming, but certainly a good grounding in mathematics. And that got me my first job. And then there was a progression from that first job that sort of started to become clearer and clearer, the direction my expertise would take me. Yeah. And you went back to the States as well. You said you did some studying in the States and then you went back to the States. Why, how was that? Well, in 1985, got married, my wife's from Pittsburgh, so I gave up my job in Bristol and moved to the States. And it was a little bit of a period of very brief period of uncertainty because I was temporarily without a job. And then almost miraculously, this ad appeared in the local newspaper which had no business being there. It was sort of nestled among ads for gardeners or nannies or odd job people. But it was like my perfect job was this little ad sort of nestled where it had no right to be. And I answered it. And then a week later I was working as a mathematician and software engineer for a high tech robotics company. It was quite extraordinary really. And that really kick started my career. So three years later I was hired as the first engineer in a small startup company which specialized in the type of technology that underlies all today's artificial intelligence, the revolution we see today. And that company was really the start. It was the first prominent company that developed that type of technology. So I was in there right at the start of the AI revolution. Wow. And what were again, going back to applications, what were the applications expected of AI at that time? Well, I mean, the company's objectives were twofold. One was to provide really a software platform for exploring this technology, which was called artificial neural nets and later deep neural nets. So to provide a platform for people to discover this technology, but also to do applications. And they were fairly simple applications in credit rating or engineering modeling. Or financial prediction. But we were really hampered by the lack of computational power to give you just a brief idea. So ChatGPT, the language models, the huge, what are called deep language models that underlie it in. If you were to try and train one of those language models on one of today's computers, it would take several hundred years to do that. So what was needed was a breakthrough in computational ability. And there were really sort of three areas where breakthrough was needed or three breakthroughs which enabled today's technology. One was massive server farms, which are basically collections of computers all connected together. And sort of in parallel with that, you needed really the software to be able to encode computations on those big collections of computers. So you needed breakthroughs in languages that were in parallel with the breakthroughs in parallel computing. And then thirdly, again in parallel with that, you really needed the know how the tricks of the trade, the ways to deal with computational issues, the ways to structure real world problems. And those all sort of evolved hand in hand over, you know, the last 10, 15 years to the point where now you can do extraordinary things with artificial intelligence. Fascinating. Thank you. You are back in the UK now. So you've moved back to the UK at some point. Was that with work? Was that for other reasons? I had a succession of two or three companies that all sprang from those, those first jobs and the company I was working for in around 2000 closed down its office in Pittsburgh, which is where I, where I was living. And I had the opportunity to move back to the UK with my family and I ended up a few years later joining Microsoft and working for their research division in Cambridge, which was sort of situated there because of the university and which was a great source of talent for the company. It was my dream job really. I was continuing to work in artificial intelligence. I had an incredible set of colleagues, some brilliant researchers and working on very, very interesting projects and very creative stuff as well. We talked about. You started off asking about my creative side and I consider actually in research and development, you're doing a lot of creative stuff. You're creating a new bit of mathematics or you're figuring out how to solve a problem that no one's ever solved before. So I think there's a lot of creative juices need to get applied there. Yeah. Oh, perfect. So then aside from that writing and moving on to the next writing, I'm assuming that you became interested in this topic before doing the translations and writing a book for yourself. So when and how did you become interested specifically in the story of the Air crash. Or maybe it was with that area of the world, I'm not sure. Well, maybe it's a good time to summarize the story. Please do. Just in case some of your listeners are not, are not familiar with it. So it was 1972, October 13th. Friday, October 13th. A Chilean rugby. Sorry, a Uruguayan rugby team who all knew each other, were very close to each other. They chartered a plane to go and play a couple of friendly matches in with a similar sort of team in Chile. The pilot took a wrong turn in the Andes. The plane crashed against a ridge, a mountain ridge. The wings came off, the tail came off, some of the passengers were sucked out the back. The fuselage, the wingless fuselage landed the other side of the ridge. It tobogganed miraculously missing rocks and outcrops. It tobogganed a mile down the other side of the mountain and landed up in a very remote glacier that no one had ever been to and came to rest on this glacier with high mountains all around. Extraordinarily, 29 people were still alive after the first night. They sheltered in the, in the broken fuselage. They of course, expected rescue to come. Within a couple of days. They heard some search planes. After about a week it was clear that no rescue was going to come. And they made some exploratory trips away from the fuselage. But it was was way too cold to stay out at night. The snow was too deep. They couldn't really escape from where they were. So they had to make the difficult decision to use their friends bodies for food. A week later, an avalanche engulfed the fuselage at night and eight more died. And that time there were 19 survivors who were stuck in this tiny space inside the fuselage for three days. They finally extricated themselves. They made more expeditions which were not successful. Eventually they constructed a sleeping bag out of insulation material and two of them set out on a 10 day trek across the Andes. They were on their last legs when they were spotted by a Chilean cattle drover. And he rode down the mountain to the nearest town and alerted the authorities. And in the end there were 16 survivors who'd been missing for 72 days on the mountain. So it's quite an extraordinary story and there are many fascinating aspects of the story that was just a brief sort of summary. One of the things I found really fascinating was the close knit community from which they came. So to give you an idea of that, in 1960, 12 years before the accident, 26 out of the 40 passengers were attending the same small school in their neighborhood, the neighborhood of Carrasco. Which is this lovely beachfront neighborhood in Montevideo. So there was this extraordinary connection. And the families of those who survived and those who died, they all lived side by side back then and they still do today. I mean, this community is still the same community as it was back then. And that really fascinated me. And when I read the authorized book on the subject, which was Alive by Pierce Paul Reid. Fantastic book. It's a brilliant piece of writing. There wasn't much about those who didn't survive and I was curious about them. I felt a story this iconic, you know, it's just a twist of fate as to who was sitting where when the plane crashed or who was lying where when the avalanche engulfed them. And I really felt a wish to know more about them. And that was sort of the seed for the idea for the book. Now, how did I actually get involved? Well, I had an adventure holiday planned in 2013 which fell through, and that's a last minute substitute. I thought, well, I'd actually like to go to the site of the accident. And I found out there was an expedition. It was run by, and still is, by an American Mexican mountaineer, guy called Ricardo Pena. And along on this expedition comes one of the survivors, a chap called Eduardo Strauch. And I went on that and it was a marvelous experience. It's quite an impression, sort of arriving in that place where this iconic event took place, you know, where these young men were. Sort of 72 days on the mountain. It's almost surreal and it's very emotional and you get a sense of separation from the world because it's. You're going several hours in a 4x4 and then two days of riding on special mountain horses up to the site. So there's a great sense of separation from the world. It really is a great experience. But that was my sort of first introduction and that and another trip a couple of years later. I started gradually to get to know various people in the community, both survivors and non survivors. I already talked about the two books I translated. And when I was doing the book translations, I contacted Piers Paul Reed, who'd written Alive. He was very supportive of my project and he gave me access to his archive, which is an incredible source of original material that he collected in 1973. And that really, I guess, added to my interest in the story because now I got very deeply into it and I sought out various other archives, both public and private, to the point where by 2019, when I started thinking about the book, I probably knew more about the story than any other outsider and then in 2019, I. I had a sabbatical from work and I went over to Uruguay. I'd been several times before. In the meantime, building up contacts, getting to know people and so on. I went over in 2019 for six weeks with nothing planned other than just to speak to lots of people and interview them. And it was an extraordinary experience. I was received with great courtesy and hospitality and friendship and trust. Word of my project sort of spread and I got introduced to a whole chain of people and all of them were happy to talk with me and they were happy for me to record them. And that was really, you know, when I got back to the UK, that's when I started writing. That was November 2019. Yeah. I was going to ask about the reception. Why do you think they were so open to. To an outsider coming in and asking them questions or, you know, I don't know, does it not feel like you were poking around or. Yeah, I mean, I think if I'd just gone as a casual person and started poking around, you know, maybe I would have got a different reception. But I think there were several things in my favor. First of all, I translated these books, so I had some, you know, gravitas or whatever. I mean, I had done some serious work, non sensationalist sort of work. In. In that sense I was trusted. Yeah. I think another thing was I. I had a huge knowledge of the event, so I'd go and speak to people and they'd be amazed how much I knew that. How did you know that? And so on. I think a third thing was the time was right. For many, many years the subject was taboo within this community because it was easier not to talk about it, rather than fear opening up the very severe wounds. I think perhaps another thing was I was quite low key. I wasn't a journalist, I wasn't seeking a sensationalist story. The way I put it was I wanted to really tell the stories of their loved ones for history, that it was important that the whole story be told. And then once I had some close contacts at the beginning, and then I started to get more and more and word of mouth spread. So I think it was that perfect personal word of mouth touch that also helped. And I think finally it was important that an outsider tell the story for it to be balanced and sort of equal across all the protagonists within the story, which would have been, I think, very difficult for someone from Uruguay to achieve that. Yeah. So coming on then to the actual physical process of putting all of this work that you've done all of the, you know, conversations there, the research around that, the trips that you've done, and then deciding that you want to write this balanced piece. There's two. There's two elements in my mind to this question. One is the actual practicality of time and the actual sitting down and doing the work. How did you get fit that in? And two is how did you find the actual process of creating a book that somebody wants to read? The kind of creative side of that. And we talked a little bit earlier on about finding your voice. So those two elements, time and your voice. So time. First of all, at that point in 2019, I was ready down to working three days a week. I wanted to sit back from work a little bit. So I had two days plus the weekend, plus it was the time of COVID so I didn't have my commute because I was working from home. So I'd sort of managed to gain a few hours in the week where I could do some serious uninterrupted writing. I mean, typically it was Thursday to Sunday evening, but I soon found that, you know, it just wasn't going to work. So when I could, I had to wait. A year after my sabbatical, I retired from my full time job so I could give all my time to writing the book. Another aspect of time, I guess, was I forced myself to write every day whether the writing was good or not. And I think that was very important because I was getting stuff down on paper and I might completely rewrite it later, but it was important that I get it down because that helped to sort of structure the book and to see what I needed to do. You know, in my mind I was always sort of planning, you know, if I'm going to write that, then who will I need to speak to, what resource will I need, and et cetera, et cetera. So I was constantly juggling these thoughts in my head as I was writing, and I didn't really know what the book would look like. I knew what I wanted to write about, I knew all the aspects of what I wanted to write about, but I didn't know how it would hang together, how it would fit together. And that sort of happened organically as I was writing the book in terms of writing style and so on. To begin with, I just plunged in. I started writing a few stories. I wrote a little bit of History of Uruguay. It was very important for me to set this sort of broad context, to really embed the reader in the community so they could understand the full scope of the tragedy you know, in depth. So I started writing those bits and of course I rewrote them later, but I. It was taking that first plunge that was very important. And I just, I just started writing and I was writing all hours of the day and then refining it later as I started to find my. My voice. Because initially it wasn't quite as I wanted it. It took probably a few months to get the tone that I wanted to write. In those first few not very good chapters I wrote, I actually sent them to the people I'd interviewed and that sort of inspired them to provide me with more in depth information because they saw, well, this is actually going to be reality. It's not just some guy from England coming to chat and saying he's going to write a book, but not really doing it. So as it became a reality, a reality that sort of added positive feedback into the process. And I. After the initial round of interviews, I had many, many more conversations by WhatsApp or by email, just making sure I got things correct. I sort of represented their brother correctly and so on. And I think the final bit that I found quite interesting is that I was reading much more than I normally read during that writing process. And I found that very useful because as I read different authors, I paid special attention to how they put together sentences. And sort of by extrapolating from that or interpolating from that, I was able to find my own voice. So probably my voice is sort of some synthesis of some of the books that I was reading at the time. Oh, wow. Yeah. Thinking around, outside of the research and the putting it all together, have you found that this creative endeavor, this process of writing a book, has it had an influence on your outside life, on you personally, or, you know, a wider influence than just the book itself and the writing itself? Well, I mean, certainly first of all, there was a great sense of achievement and satisfaction and relief that I'd finished and a sense of disbelief that I'd pulled it off. Because when I was writing, I was like a man possessed. Like I was in the eye of the storm. But I felt this calm. I knew I was going to do it. In terms of its influence on me, I think it gave me a lot of confidence in how to go about doing things, how to achieve success. I learned to be bold, to be brave. My advice would be, if you're passionate about something, then pursue it aggressively. Be bold and brave and plan for success. Assume you're going to succeed and then take the necessary steps to achieve that. If, if you think you're not going to succeed, then you won't succeed. You have to assume that you will succeed and then plan for that success. The final thing I'd say there is that both through the process of writing and after writing it brought me in contact with many, many people. So first of all, I've learned lots of things from just speaking to people, other perspectives and so on. I. I've met some wonderful friends, both among the people I interviewed, but also among my readers who've contacted me and said, you know, we love your book and, you know, wanted to know more and so on. So I've made a lot of friends and that's really been very enriching. That's lovely. What about plans for the future? Are you a planner for the future? Do you have any aspirations of what's next? I'm a planner in some things, but I also believe you have to take what comes along and deal with it the best you can and plans are there to be changed. So I don't have a specific plan to write another book, but I have been doing some writing, or rather I've been doing some transcribing, some commentary on the diaries of my great grandmother who was an intrepid traveler. So when she was 50, her kids had left home, she set out on a series of solo trips to Africa. This was around 1930 or so. She crossed the Sahara twice. She went into deepest, what was in colonial times called French Equatorial Africa. So that's Cameroon, the Congos and Gabon, Mali and so on, going deep into those areas, staying in little villages and being entertained by the local chief and the local villagers. And she kept a diary for all of that. And she has some marvelous photographs of her trips which I think are quite unique and important. So I've been documenting that, putting it into digestible form for the family. But who knows, maybe that might become a book one day, but I don't have specific plans for that. What a brilliant story. Crikey, what a lady. Brilliant. That's been really lovely. John, tell me how people can connect with you and find the book. Well, my website is johnguiver.org that's J-O-H N G-U I V E R.org and that's sort of the one stop place where you can find out a bit about the story, about the books, the translations. I did some links there to documentaries, podcasts, et cetera. There's also a contact page there if people want to get in touch with me. If you just want to purchase the book, you can go to Amazon is called to play the game. There's a color version because there are a lot of pictures, and there's also a monochrome version which is cheaper, or the digital version is on Google Playbooks. Anyway, all that's on the website if you go there. Thank you so much for talking with me today, John. It's really been my pleasure, Claire. And thank you very much for inviting me. You're welcome. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, perhaps you'd like to financially contribute to future episodes at buymeacoffee.com/CreativityFound There's a link in the Show Notes. If you are listening on a value for value enabled app such as Fountain TrueFans or Podcast Guru, feel free to send a few sats my way. And if you have no idea of what I'm talking about, you can find out more by listening to my sister podcast called Podcasting 2.0 In Practice.