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
The False Science of Cryonics
I woke up on Saturday to a heartbreaking front-page article in the New York Times about a terminally ill young woman who chooses to freeze her brain.
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
Putting Technology in Its Place
Kentaro Toyama calls himself "a recovering technoholic"—someone who once was "addicted to a technological way of solving problems."
From ACM Opinion
AI Doomsayer Says His Ideas Are Catching On
Philosopher Nick Bostrom says major tech companies are listening to his warnings about artificial intelligence.
From ACM Opinion
Our Fear of Artificial Intelligence
Years ago I had coffee with a friend who ran a startup.
From ACM News
2014 in Computing: Breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence
The holy grail of artificial intelligence—creating software that comes close to mimicking human intelligence—remains far off. But 2014 saw major strides in machine...
From ACM Opinion
What Are Moocs Good For?
A few years ago, the most enthusiastic advocates of MOOCs believed that these "massive open online courses" stood poised to overturn the century-old model of higher...
From ACM Opinion
Isaac Asimov Mulls 'how Do People Get New Ideas?'
In 1959, I worked as a scientist at Allied Research Associates in Boston.
From ACM Opinion
What It Will Take For Computers to Be Conscious
Is a worm conscious? How about a bumblebee? Does a computer that can play chess "feel" anything?
From ACM Opinion
Technology Stalled in 1970
Peter Thiel has been behind some prominent technologies: he cofounded PayPal and was an early investor in such companies as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tesla Motors...
From ACM Opinion
The History Inside S
Every day our DNA breaks a little. Special enzymes keep our genome intact while we're alive, but after death, once the oxygen runs out, there is no more repair.
From ACM Opinion
In Praise of Efficient Price Gouging
In the four years since the car service Uber launched, it has been beset by criticism from myriad groups, including city officials annoyed by its sometimes cavalier...
From ACM Opinion
Former Nsa Deputy Director John C. Inglis
More than a year after ex-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden began leaking details of the agency's electronic surveillance programs, questions remain...
From ACM Opinion
Three Questions For J. Craig Venter
Genome scientist and entrepreneur J. Craig Venter is best known for being the first person to sequence his own genome, back in 2001.
From ACM Opinion
Three Questions For Robotics Inventor Cynthia Breazeal About Social Robots
As an academic, Cynthia Breazeal pioneered research into social interaction between humans and robots, developing Kismet, a robot that used facial expressions in...
From ACM Opinion
Ray Kurzweil Says He's Breathing Intelligence Into Google Search
The big announcements at Google's I/O event in San Francisco Wednesday didn't mention Web search, the technology that got the company started and made it so successful...
From ACM Opinion
Joseph Ledoux
When it comes to the study of memory, we might be living in something of a golden age.
From ACM Opinion