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:

* SHRDLU

* Beyond Programming Languages

* What Does It Mean to Understand Language?

* The PageRank Citation Ranking

* Stanford Digital Libraries project

* Talk: My Politics as a Technologist

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