A Conversation with Emily M. Bender and Ted Chiang

Emily M. Bender is a professor of linguistics and an adjunct professor in the School of Computer Science and the Information School at the University of Washington, where she has been on the faculty since 2003. Her research interests include multilingual grammar engineering, computational semantics, and the societal impacts of language technology. She is the coauthor of recent influential papers such as “Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data” (2020), “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? .” (2021), and “AI and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Benchmark” (2021). In 2022 she was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Together with Dr. Alex Hanna, she hosts Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, a podcast that skewers AI hype.

Ted Chiang's fiction has won four Hugo, four Nebula, and six Locus Awards and has been reprinted in Best American Short Stories. His first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, has been translated into twenty-one languages, and the title story was the basis for the Oscar-nominated film Arrival. His second collection, Exhalation, was chosen by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of 2019.

Tom Nissley is the owner of Phinney Books and Madison Books in Seattle. He is the author of A Reader's Book of Days (2014), has a PhD in English from the University of Washington, and was an eight-time champion on Jeopardy!