Terry Winograd: AI, HCI, Language, and Cognition

In episode 87 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir (twitter.com/spaniel_bashir) speaks to Professor Terry Winograd.
Professor Winograd is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University. His research focuses on human-computer interaction design and the design of technologies for development. He founded the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction Group, where he directed the teaching programs and HCI research. He is also a founding faculty member of the Stanford d.school and a founding member and past president of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.
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Outline:
* (00:00) Intro
* (03:00) Professor Winograd’s background
* (05:10) At the MIT AI Lab
* (05:45) The atmosphere in the MIT AI Lab, Minsky/Chomsky debates
* (06:20) Blue-sky research, government funding for academic research
* (10:10) Isolation and collaboration between research groups
* (11:45) Phases in the development of ideas and how cross-disciplinary work fits in
* (12:26) SHRDLU and the MIT AI Lab’s intellectual roots
* (17:20) Early responses to SHRDLU: Minsky, Dreyfus, others
* (20:55) How Prof. Winograd’s thinking about AI’s abilities and limitations evolved
* (22:25) How this relates to current AI systems and discussions of intelligence
* (23:47) Repetitive debates in AI, semantics and grounding
* (27:00) The concept of investment, care, trust in human communication vs machine communication
* (28:53) Projecting human-ness onto AI systems and non-human things and what this means for society
* (31:30) Time after leaving MIT in 1973, time at Xerox PARC, how Winograd’s thinking evolved during this time
* (38:28) What Does It Mean to Understand Language? Speech acts, commitments, and the grounding of language
* (42:40) Reification of representations in science and ML
* (46:15) LLMs, their training processes, and their behavior
* (49:40) How do we coexist with systems that we don’t understand?
* (51:20) Progress narratives in AI and human agency
* (53:30) Transitioning to intelligence augmentation, founding the Stanford HCI group and d.school, advising Larry Page and Sergey Brin
* (1:01:25) Chatbots and how we consume information
* (1:06:52) Evolutions in journalism, progress in trust for modern AI systems
* (1:09:18) Shifts in the social contract, from institutions to personalities
* (1:12:05) AI and HCI in recent years
* (1:17:05) Philosophy of design and the d.school
* (1:21:20) Designing AI systems for people
* (1:25:10) Prof. Winograd’s perspective on watermarking for detecting GPT outputs
* (1:25:55) The politics of being a technologist
* (1:30:10) Echos of the past in AI regulation and competition and learning from history
* (1:32:34) Outro
Links:
* Professor Winograd’s Homepage (hci.stanford.edu/winograd)
* Papers/topics discussed:
* SHRDLU (hci.stanford.edu/~winograd/shrdlu)
* Beyond Programming Languages (dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/359131.359133)
* What Does It Mean to Understand Language? (hci.stanford.edu/courses/cs047n/readings/winog…)
* The PageRank Citation Ranking (eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/CS222/pagerank.pdf)
* Stanford Digital Libraries project (diglib.stanford.edu:8091)
* Talk: My Politics as a Technologist (youtube.com/watch?v=ZXgQ2QbtPr0)

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