CHM Blog
The CHM blog showcases ideas and insights from our vibrant community in Silicon Valley and around the world. We take you behind the scenes of our programming, collections, and exhibits. Connecting the past to the present and into the future, we decode technology for everyone.
Curatorial Insights
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Curatorial Insights
Relax. Machines Already Took Our Jobs
Tuesday, February 16, 2021
The machines took over most tasks long ago, but we hardly notice any more. The long history of automation shows us that changes that happen slowly enough become the new normal.
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Curatorial Insights, From the Collection
Thinking about Machines and Thinking
Thursday, January 28, 2021
He likely arrived in Paris from Darmstadt, Germany, by train that January, exactly seventy years ago. At 53, and a full professor of applied mathematics and the founding director of the Institut für Praktische Mathematik at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt, Alwin Walther was among Germany’s leading figures in comput
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Curatorial Insights
Silicon Valley Turns 50
Monday, January 11, 2021
Fifty years ago, a front-page article in the tech-industry’s leading newspaper introduced a new nickname for a cluster of sleepy agricultural communities near San Jose, California.
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Curatorial Insights
AI and Play, Part 2: Go and Deep Learning
Wednesday, August 5, 2020
One of the most influential demonstrations of the superiority of deep learning over old-fashioned symbolic AI arrived when Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat the world champion in the ancient Chinese game, Go.
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Curatorial Insights
How Do Neural Network Systems Work?
Wednesday, August 5, 2020
As the name suggests, artificial neural networks are modeled on biological neural networks in the brain. The brain is made up of cells called neurons, which send signals to each other through connections known as synapses.
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Curatorial Insights
AI and Play, Part 1: How Games Have Driven Two Schools of AI Research
Thursday, July 23, 2020
Today, AI based on deep learning and neural networks is taking the world by storm. However, many of the algorithms that guide our web searches and driving directions today are much older, rooted in what people now call “Good, Old Fashioned AI,” also known as “symbolic” AI.
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Curatorial Insights
Summer Reads from CHM
Monday, July 20, 2020
As Dave Barry observed, reading is "a vacation for the mind," and we can certainly all use a break right about now. Here are some tech-related ideas for your summer reading pleasure!
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Curatorial Insights
Pioneers of Semiconductor Non-Volatile Memory (NVM): The First Four Decades
Monday, May 18, 2020
As with every significant semiconductor product development, from the transistor to the microprocessor, NVM devices evolved from the work of pioneering researchers who built on the efforts of their predecessors through intuitive insights, lucky breaks, trial and error, and a determination to ignore the doubts of naysay
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Curatorial Insights, Internet History Program
Where to Next?
Tuesday, November 26, 2019
It's a Tuesday morning in 2037. You hurriedly brush your teeth and dress to meet the self-driving car arriving downstairs. As it pulls away from the curb, what world awaits?
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Curatorial Insights
Silicon Chips Take Man to the Moon
Wednesday, July 17, 2019
This is the story of these people, deeply involved in “work to put him there,” and how a decision to employ this unproven technology, criticized at the time as reckless, helped to launch the integrated circuit as an essential building block of today's digital world.