An incredible interview. For someone new to the field, this interview offers an excellent overview of the early history of AI. I found an interesting tension at work between Winograd's notion of symmetrical awareness and his older commitments to cybernetics. If we cannot really know "what IT is," how can humans experience something like symmetry even in the face of another human? But I sense I might be overreading a passing notion on his part. As a sort of sidebar: I wonder how technological mediations impact the sense of symmetrical awareness. As human-human contact is deferred, complicated, and reimagined via new technology, how is symmetrical awareness altered, erased, and reconfigured? All of this is a long way of saying that I personally feel that these new LLMs have disrupted the possibility of relying on symmetrical awareness as a reliable ground except perhaps in the most local, in-person environments. And that we can say this without necessarily positing that LLMs exhibit anything reminiscent of human consciousness.
Terry Winograd: AI, HCI, Language, and Cognition
Great interviews lately. I was critical of "monologue-style" episodes in a past comment, but the podcast now just keeps getting better and better.
Oh... this is going to be amazing. Can't wait to listen!!!
An incredible interview. For someone new to the field, this interview offers an excellent overview of the early history of AI. I found an interesting tension at work between Winograd's notion of symmetrical awareness and his older commitments to cybernetics. If we cannot really know "what IT is," how can humans experience something like symmetry even in the face of another human? But I sense I might be overreading a passing notion on his part. As a sort of sidebar: I wonder how technological mediations impact the sense of symmetrical awareness. As human-human contact is deferred, complicated, and reimagined via new technology, how is symmetrical awareness altered, erased, and reconfigured? All of this is a long way of saying that I personally feel that these new LLMs have disrupted the possibility of relying on symmetrical awareness as a reliable ground except perhaps in the most local, in-person environments. And that we can say this without necessarily positing that LLMs exhibit anything reminiscent of human consciousness.
this is one of the best interviews yet! Winograd is not only a CS history icon, he's the most amazing CS teacher and researcher!
Don't most pronounce SHRDLU as sure'-duh-loo?