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What the Future of Work Means for Cities
From ACM Opinion

What the Future of Work Means for Cities

Two weeks ago, MIT's David Autor gave the prestigious Richard T. Ely lecture at the annual meeting of American economists in Atlanta. Introduced by the former chair...

Apple CEO Tim Cook on Screen Time Controls, Working with China
From ACM Opinion

Apple CEO Tim Cook on Screen Time Controls, Working with China

Tim Cook, who has led Apple since 2011, spoke with NPR's Steve Inskeep in a wide-ranging interview on Monday as the company kicked off its annual Worldwide Developers...

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...

President Trump's New Order Gives China Tech Opportunity To 'hire American' Too
From ACM Opinion

President Trump's New Order Gives China Tech Opportunity To 'hire American' Too

The same week that President Trump issued his hire American executive order, the president of one of China's top tech companies said his company wants to do the...

Will Algorithms Erode Our Decision-Making Skills?
From ACM Opinion

Will Algorithms Erode Our Decision-Making Skills?

Algorithms are embedded into our technological lives, helping accomplish a variety of tasks like making sure that email makes it to your aunt or that you're matched...

Presidential Campaigns Are Talking Around The Robot In The Room
From ACM Opinion

Presidential Campaigns Are Talking Around The Robot In The Room

While U.S. presidential candidates are talking about tax rates, tax breaks, and trade — they are ignoring an economic issue that soon may matter far more to working...

Remembering a Thinker Who Thought About Thinking
From ACM Opinion

Remembering a Thinker Who Thought About Thinking

The field of educational technology is mourning a visionary whose work was considered 50 years ahead of its time.

If To Err Is Human, Should Technology Help ­s Shed Some Humanity?
From ACM Opinion

If To Err Is Human, Should Technology Help ­s Shed Some Humanity?

By all accounts, technology has made us safer.

What Machines Can Learn from People and We Can Learn from Them
From ACM Opinion

What Machines Can Learn from People and We Can Learn from Them

Guruduth Banavar is an executive at IBM leading the team developing a new generation of cognitive systems—don't call it artificial intelligence—known as Watson.

How Close Are We Really to a Robot-Run Society?
From ACM Opinion

How Close Are We Really to a Robot-Run Society?

From Rosie, the Jetsons' robot maid, to Arnold Schwarzenegger's cyborg in The Terminator, popular culture has frequently conceived of robots as having a human-like...

An Npr Reporter Raced a Machine to Write a News Story. Who Won?
From ACM Opinion

An Npr Reporter Raced a Machine to Write a News Story. Who Won?

Even the most creative jobs have parts that are pretty routine—tasks that, at least in theory, can be done by a machine. Take, for example, being a reporter.

Attention White-Collar Workers: The Robots Are Coming For Your Jobs
From ACM Opinion

Attention White-Collar Workers: The Robots Are Coming For Your Jobs

From the self-checkout aisle of the grocery store to the sports section of the newspaper, robots and computer software are increasingly taking the place of humans...

Are We to Become Gods, the Destroyers of Our World?
From ACM Opinion

Are We to Become Gods, the Destroyers of Our World?

In the stylish new sci-fi thriller Ex Machina, Frankenstein's old theme re-emerges in a beautifully designed setting: Instead of the Gothic castle we have a spectacular...

The Turing Test Is Not What You Think It Is
From ACM Opinion

The Turing Test Is Not What You Think It Is

Whether or not you caught wind of the excited announcement that "Eugene Goostman," a computer program ("chatbot") devised by Vladimir Veselov, Eugene Demchenko,...

Mit's Magic Bag Of Sand
From ACM Opinion

Mit's Magic Bag Of Sand

The camera pushes in. And there, near the meridian line, you see a faint scattering of red lights. Something is in the tar. And it's glowing.
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