Convergence, ambient technology, and success in innovation

Stanford professor Terry Winograd was a founder and national president of Computer Professionals for Responsibility, and is currently on sabbatical at Google. He studied natural language processing under Seymour Papert at the MIT AI Lab. He has also worked at Xerox PARC.

Winograd: "Pre-Mosaic, the Web was uninteresting because it didn't have pictures. Transferring text and following links to other pieces of text seemed very academic. Putting images in completely changed the feel.

... The idea that you can index billions of pages and look for a word and get what you want is quite a trick.

... I always was interested in the question of how language worked. So, in that sense, I was a linguist. ... But I was never interested in subtleties about pronoun movement in Swahili."

Winograd to Larry Page, of Google: "There's a lot of stuff you guys are doing that has general applicability to human-computer interaction. It's not just about search engines. It's about how you interact with systems."

Winograd: "[I want to look at Google] from the perspective of what it can tell us about how people interact with systems in general and how might that be applied outside of search engines.

... Great innovations happen from time to time in history, but they're not something you can just will into being.