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How the Enlightenment Ends
From ACM Opinion

How the Enlightenment Ends

Three years ago, at a conference on transatlantic issues, the subject of artificial intelligence appeared on the agenda. I was on the verge of skipping that session—it...

Facial Recognition Tech Is Creepy When It Works, And Creepier When It Doesn't
From ACM Opinion

Facial Recognition Tech Is Creepy When It Works, And Creepier When It Doesn't

For the last few years, police forces around China have invested heavily to build the world's largest video surveillance and facial recognition system, incorporating...

'2001: A Space Odyssey' Is Still the '­ltimate Trip'
From ACM Opinion

'2001: A Space Odyssey' Is Still the '­ltimate Trip'

In the spring of 1964 the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was very worried. NASA was about to fly the Mariner 4 space probe past Mars.

How Frightened Should We Be of A.I.?
From ACM Opinion

How Frightened Should We Be of A.I.?

Precisely how and when will our curiosity kill us?

Chinese-American Elites Lament a Brewing Trade War
From ACM Opinion

Chinese-American Elites Lament a Brewing Trade War

It's not easy to promote closer US-China ties these days.

Why Silicon Valley Must Go to War
From ACM Opinion

Why Silicon Valley Must Go to War

Should technologists prevent their tools from being used to wage war? This question was answered with a furious yes at Google recently, when more than 3,000 employees ...

AI Can Help Cybersecurity, If It Can Fight Through the Hype
From ACM Opinion

AI Can Help Cybersecurity, If It Can Fight Through the Hype

Walking the enormous exhibition halls at the recent RSA security conference in San Francisco, you could have easily gotten the impression that digital defense was...

Autonomous Weapons Would Take Warfare to a New Domain, Without Humans
From ACM Opinion

Autonomous Weapons Would Take Warfare to a New Domain, Without Humans

Killer robots have been a staple of TV and movies for decades, from Westworld to The Terminator series. But in the real world, killer robots are officially known...

When John Doerr Brought a 'Gift' to Google's Founders
From ACM Opinion

When John Doerr Brought a 'Gift' to Google's Founders

On a fall day in 1999, in the heart of Silicon Valley, I arrived at a two-story, L-shaped structure off the 101 freeway. It was young Google's headquarters, and...

Putting Trust in Security Engineering
From Communications of the ACM

Putting Trust in Security Engineering

Proposing a stronger foundation for an engineering discipline to support the design of secure systems.

Science, Policy, and Service
From Communications of the ACM

Science, Policy, and Service

Some thoughts on the way forward.

Who Has More of Your Personal Data Than Facebook? Try Google
From ACM Opinion

Who Has More of Your Personal Data Than Facebook? Try Google

Recent controversy over Facebook Inc.'s hunger for personal data has surfaced the notion that the online advertising industry could be hazardous to our privacy...

'2001: A Space Odyssey': What It Means, and How It Was Made
From ACM Opinion

'2001: A Space Odyssey': What It Means, and How It Was Made

Fifty years ago this spring, Stanley Kubrick's confounding sci-fi masterpiece, "2001: A Space Odyssey," had its premières across the country.

Why Police Should Monitor Social Media to Prevent Crime
From ACM Opinion

Why Police Should Monitor Social Media to Prevent Crime

In February, the ACLU of Massachusetts released a damning report detailing prejudice in social media surveillance efforts by the Boston Police Department (BPD)....

Why Silicon Valley Shouldn't Work With the Pentagon
From ACM Opinion

Why Silicon Valley Shouldn't Work With the Pentagon

Is Silicon Valley going to war?

Here's How Hackers Could Cause Chaos in This Year's ­S Midterm Elections
From ACM Opinion

Here's How Hackers Could Cause Chaos in This Year's ­S Midterm Elections

On November 6, Americans will head to the polls to vote in the congressional midterm elections. In the months before the contest, hordes of foreign hackers will...

Regulate Artificial Intelligence to Avert Cyber Arms Race
From ACM Opinion

Regulate Artificial Intelligence to Avert Cyber Arms Race

Cyberattacks are becoming more frequent, sophisticated and destructive. Each day in 2017, the United States suffered, on average, more than 4,000 ransomware attacks...

The White House Loses Its Cybersecurity Brain Trust
From ACM Opinion

The White House Loses Its Cybersecurity Brain Trust

Today, the White House confirmed that cybersecurity coordinator Rob Joyce will head back to the National Security Agency, where he previously ran the nation's top...

Can Europe Lead on Privacy?
From ACM Opinion

Can Europe Lead on Privacy?

"We have a responsibility to protect your information," Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, declared recently in a full-page newspaper advertisement...

We May Own Our Data, But Facebook Has a Duty to Protect It
From ACM Opinion

We May Own Our Data, But Facebook Has a Duty to Protect It

Two years ago, Jack M. Balkin, a constitutional-law professor at Yale, published a fifty-page article in the U.C. Davis Law Review examining what he called problems...
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