In episode 87 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel 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
Papers/topics discussed:
What Does It Mean to Understand Language?
Stanford Digital Libraries project
Talk: My Politics as a Technologist
Read More in The Gradient
