Terry Winograd
Stanford University
What's up with AI?
Abstract
The current boom in AI has been accompanied with tremendous hype, both negative and positive. My goal is to go beneath this surface and provide a better understanding of what AI systems are actually doing, and what concerns I have about where they are going. I am neither an enthusiast nor a doomer. The very real problems created by AI today and in the foreseeable future need to be approached by looking at the ways we (in the broad sense) choose to apply it and the way in which we fit it into our world. The bottom line is that we need to approach all of the issues with the recognition that large language models and similar systems have no real understanding or intention, even though they often promote the image that they do. They can still be useful in many contexts, as long as we recognize the need for humans to provide the foundation of care.
About
Terry Winograd is Professor Emeritus in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. During his 40 years of teaching and research he created and directed the Human-Computer Interaction Group and the teaching and research program in Human-Computer Interaction Design at Stanford. He was a founding faculty member of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (the "d.school").
Winograd did pioneering research in artificial intelligence, in particular natural language understanding, during his PhD program at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in the 1960s. His 1986 book with Fernando Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition, marked a major departure in the philosophy underlying AI. He was a founding member and National President of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. He is a member of the ACM CHI Academy and an ACM Fellow. He received the 2011 CHI Lifetime Research Achievement Award. He is a Fellow of the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute and is on the board of Corporate Accountability International. He has been a consultant to a number of companies, including Google, founded by Stanford students from his projects.