This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times.
On a recent overcast morning at the Computer History Museum, there was a bike near the entry painted in the colors of the Google logo. These bikes allow employees to navigate the tech giant’s 42-acre campus, which sits across the street from the museum and sprawls to the edge of San Francisco Bay.
The presence of one of Google’s bikes here signals how embedded the museum is geographically, and culturally, in Silicon Valley. So do the names of tech insiders on a donor board inside, near the museum’s new exhibit: “Chatbots Decoded: Exploring A.I.”
An introductory panel describes advances in artificial intelligence as both worrisome and wondrous, the result of a long obsession with talking automatons. Glass cases contain a human form made to speak (by trickery), an attraction at long-ago carnivals, and vintage books fantasizing about robots.
Through a gap in the opening sequence of panels, visitors catch a glimpse of Ameca — a torso and a head on a pedestal, with eyes that often follow visitors through the space.
When I reached Ameca, I asked it to rap about the history of the computer. Its pale blue eyes flitted sideways, then it served up this bit of narration: “Apple with its bytes so bright, personal computing taking flight. IBM joined the fight, turning data into insights overnight.”
This was wondrous enough, an introduction of sorts to the stories of two American tech giants featured centrally in the main exhibition, across the lobby, “Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.”
The design firm Engineered Arts modeled and produced Ameca, releasing it in 2021; a limited number have since circulated to trade shows and museums. Designed to be without gender or race, (its face is covered in gray rubber skin), this Ameca was purchased by the Computer History Museum for this exhibit and is programmed to access a version of ChatGPT, the famous conversational A.I. app.
After I left Ameca, a young boy approached it. Many of the words he said were inaudible, but “I hate you” was in the mix.
“I get it — robots can be uncanny,” the humanoid responded mildly.
In an interview in the museum’s airy lobby, its chief curatorial and exhibitions officer, Kirsten Tashev, said Ameca often met with such hostility. Tashev spoke of “the uncanny valley phenomenon” — an English translation of a term used first by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in the 1970s to describe human unease, even disgust, with something almost human but not quite.
It is not just Ameca that seemed to generate that mix of wonder and worry. The “Chatbots” exhibit explicates the breakthroughs that led to recent advances in A.I. as a prelude to assessing the pros and cons of those advances.
It speaks of deep learning, a term computer scientists use to mean the creation of artificial neural networks, mimicking the human brain’s architecture and its ability to learn and make decisions.
It alludes to another term of art, large language models — the foundation of the ChatGPT technology used by Ameca — addressing how machines have been trained to generate human language by devouring much of the texts our gregarious species has generated.
From there, the exhibit speaks to how, on one hand, A.I. might be deployed to find cures for disease, but on the other how undergraduates use A.I. to shirk critical thought.
This is the two-step done in many exhibits here: They celebrate the creativity involved in devising and marketing new tech tools while placing them in a sufficiently broad context for consideration of their impact on the quality of our lives.
“We use the words ‘promise’ and ‘peril’ a lot,” Tashev said as she sat looking out the museum’s glass frontage, toward the edge of the Googleplex.
Among the approximately one million artifacts in the permanent collection, the museum’s incoming president and chief executive, Marc Etkind, singled out the computer that helped guide the first Apollo mission that landed on the moon in 1969.
That refrigerator sized box sits about halfway through the main exhibition, which provides a broad overview of the evolution of technology.
This exhibition begins with a discussion of the Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient Greek device some scholars say was used to predict the timing of eclipses, continues through the abacus and slide rule, then considers the more recent past, as we have moved from massive, expensive tabulating and calculating machines to ever-smaller, cheaper, more powerful ones.
On a free tour, a docent noted that the 1946 ENIAC — a small section of which is here — was the size of a three-bedroom house and had a fraction of the memory used in today’s smartphones.
Also comparatively short on memory was one of the collection’s highlights, the kit computer known as an Apple-1 — this one signed by Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with the other, more well-known Steve, Steve Jobs.
But the exhibit, as a whole, rebuts what might be called the great man theory of computer history, featuring, throughout, many contributions made by women, among them Margaret Hamilton, who helped develop the onboard flight software for the Apollo program, and, more recently, Donna Dubinsky, the co-founder of Palm, Inc., the company behind the Palm Pilot.
Dubinsky, who is a former member of the museum’s board (and married to its founding board chair Len Shustek), said in a phone interview that she saw another through line in the standing exhibit. “The leaders in tech missed the major trends over and over. The leaders in mainframe computing were not the leaders in the minicomputer revolution, the minicomputer leaders were not the leaders in personal computers, the PC leaders were not the leaders in hand-held.”
Other visitors might find different through lines. Creative types might focus on the exhibits showing how computer-aided design programs expanded what buildings could be created, and how synthesizers powered many of the greatest hits of the 1980s.
Military-history geeks might check out the Enigma machine (used by the Nazis to send coded messages during World War II), while longtime gamers might see if they can still win at early games like Ms. Pac-Man and Pong.
“There is nostalgia, absolutely, in the DNA of the Computer History Museum,” Dag Spicer, the museum’s senior curator, said in a phone interview.
Though the word history is in its title, the museum has tried to stay relevant, he said, to “weave itself into the current ecosystem” of Silicon Valley. It frequently hosts events with leaders — recent ones have featured the likes of Bill Gates and OpenAI’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.
As the museum moves forward, it has reached for a new tone. Even in exhibits that annotate and admire human ingenuity, the curators try to allow space for subtlety, and to respond to a backlash in certain quarters against the ongoing computer revolution. The common aim among the curators interviewed is to speak to both the promise and peril of new innovations.
“There are questions the public has,” Tashev said. “We’re not being sensational. These are actual questions, and if we don’t address them as a museum, we’re not doing our job.”
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