Terry Winograd: Computer

Terry Winograd is American computer scientist. Explore interesting quotes on computer.

Terry Winograd: 14 quotes0 likes

“Seekers after the glitter of intelligence are misguided in trying to cast it in the base metal of computing.”

"Thinking Machines: Can there be? Are we?", in The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines (1991), ed. James J. Sheehan and Morton Sosna, p. 216.
Context: Seekers after the glitter of intelligence are misguided in trying to cast it in the base metal of computing. There is an amusing epilogue to this analogy: in fact, the alchemists were right. Lead can be converted into gold by a particle accelerator hurling appropriate beams at lead targets. The AI visionaries may be right in the same way, and they are likely to be wrong in the same way.

“There is a tendency to throw computers at third world problems, which I think is often a distraction. Putting computers in the schools is great, but it may be more important to put teachers in the schools.”

Terry Winograd

"Talking with Terry Winograd" http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/interviews/t_winograd_1.html, Ubiquity 3 (23), 29 July 2002.

“A reason to have computers understand natural language is that it’s an extremely effective way of communicating. What I came to realize is that the success of the communication depends on the real intelligence on the part of the listener, and that there are many other ways of communicating with a computer that can be more effective, given that it doesn’t have the intelligence.”

Terry Winograd

Interview in Bill Moggridge, Designing Interactions (2007), ch. 7 http://www.designinginteractions.com/interviews/TerryWinograd