Communications of the ACM
Innovation Is Overrated: A Provocation
Digital innovation is not working in the interest of the whole of society. It is time to radically rethink its purpose without…
From ACM Opinion
Are the Experts Worried About the Existential Risk of Artificial Intelligence?
If you believe everything you read, you are probably quite worried about the prospect of a superintelligent, killer AI.
From ACM Opinion
Microsoft's Top Lawyer Becomes a Civil Rights Crusader
When Apple CEO Tim Cook refused to help the FBI get into a mass murderer's iPhone last winter, he was hailed for his boldness in fighting the government on ...
From ACM Opinion
The Do-Not-Call List Has a Gaping Hole
Sure, legitimate telemarketers will refrain from calling you if you've put your phone number on it. But criminal telephone spammers will call you anyway because...
From ACM Opinion
How an Inventor You've Probably Never Heard of Shaped the Modern World
Many of the inventors who fueled the digital revolution have become household names.
From ACM Opinion
Why Russian Hackers Probably Can't Mess with the .s. Election
State-sponsored Russian hackers appear to be behind attacks on voter databases in Arizona and Illinois.
From ACM Opinion
How to Read Between the Lines of Tim Cook's Epic Interview
To celebrate five years as CEO of Apple, Tim Cook has given a very long, exclusive interview to the Washington Post about his experiences so far. But what he didn’t...
From ACM Opinion
Basic Income: A Sellout of the American Dream
Matt Krisiloff is in a small, glass-walled conference room off the lobby of Y Combinator’s office in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood, shouting distance...
From ACM Opinion
Q&a: John Chambers
Cisco Systems designs, makes, and sells the routers, switches, and other networking equipment with which businesses connect their computers, manage data centers...
From ACM Opinion
The All-American Iphone
Donald Trump says that if he becomes president, he will "get Apple to start making their computers and their iPhones on our land, not in China." Bernie Sanders...
From ACM Opinion
The Man Selling Shovels in the Machine-Learning Gold Rush
Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of the chipmaker Nvidia, is either very prescient or very lucky.
From ACM Opinion
What If Apple Is Wrong?
Soon after Devon Godfrey was shot to death in his apartment in Harlem on the evening of April 12, 2010, officers with the New York Police Department thought they...
From ACM Opinion
Head of British Intelligence Agency on Apple, Snowden, and Regrets
Shortly after Robert Hannigan took over the British signals-intelligence agency GCHQ in 2014, he implored technology companies to do more to facilitate investigations...
From ACM Opinion
The Step Needed to Make Virtual Reality More Real
It's one thing to play the arcade game Whac-A-Mole by swinging around an oversized mallet; it's far easier to whack those moles virtually, controlling the mallet...
From ACM Opinion
Will Machines Eliminate s?
Yoshua Bengio leads one of the world's preëminent research groups developing a powerful AI technique known as deep learning.
From ACM Opinion
Facebook's Cyborg Virtual Assistant Is Learning from Its Trainers
Late last month a few hundred lucky users of Facebook's mobile messaging app got an unusual new contact to talk with: M, a virtual assistant powered by a mixture...
From ACM News
Who Will Own the Robots?
The way Hod Lipson describes his Creative Machines Lab captures his ambitions: "We are interested in robots that create and are creative."
From ACM Opinion
Why Robots and Humans Struggled with Darpa's Challenge
When some of the world's most advanced rescue robots are foiled by nothing more complex than a doorknob, you get a good sense of the challenge of making our homes...
From ACM Opinion
3 Questions on Killer Robots
Delegates to the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons are meeting this week in Geneva to discuss fully autonomous weapons—machines that could...
From ACM Opinion
Toolkits For the Mind
When the Japanese computer scientist Yukihiro Matsumoto decided to create Ruby, a programming language that has helped build Twitter, Hulu, and much of the modern...
From ACM Opinion