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
China's Dystopian Tech Could Be Contagious
For all the particularities of life in China, its big cities offer a familiar cosmopolitanism.
From ACM Opinion
19th-Century Paleontology Was at the Forefront of Big Data
In 1981, when I was 9 years old, my father took me to see Raiders of the Lost Ark.
From ACM Opinion
My Pacemaker Is Tracking Me from Inside My Body
A month before turning 34, I received an unexpected birthday gift: a cloud-connected pacemaker.
From ACM Opinion
The New Way Your Computer Can Be Attacked
On January 3, the world learned about a series of major security vulnerabilities in modern microprocessors. Called Spectre and Meltdown, these vulnerabilities were...
From ACM Opinion
8 Overly Confident, Mostly Pessimistic Predictions About Tech in 2018
It was a very strange year for technology companies. They have become a "bipartisan whipping boy," a new sexist institution, responsible for the muddying of the...
From ACM Opinion
Driverless Cars Could Make Transportation Free For Everyone, With a Catch
As self-driving cars inch closer to everyday reality, journalists, futurists, economists, and ethicists have weighed in with numerous predictions about autonomous...
From ACM Opinion
A nified Theory of Meme Death
Memes aren't built to last. This is an accepted fact of online life.
From ACM Opinion
How Driverless Cars Will Change the Feel of Cities
It's 6 p.m. in Tempe, Arizona and pitch-black outside. I'm standing in the middle of a five-lane thoroughfare, among a group of people too numerous for the narrow...
From ACM Opinion
Should Children Form Emotional Bonds with Robots?
When i brought the robot home from the Apple Store, I knew I was inviting a new kind of strangeness into our lives.
From ACM Opinion
Does Facebook Even Know How to Control Facebook?
Later today, executives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter will go before the Senate Intelligence Committee to testify about the ways that Russian operatives used...
From ACM Opinion
What Facebook Did to American Democracy
In the media world, as in so many other realms, there is a sharp discontinuity in the timeline: before the 2016 election, and after.
From ACM Opinion
The Absurdity of the Nobel Prizes in Science
The fact that the Nobel Prizes awarded in science have drawn controversy since their very inception hints at deep-rooted problems. The Nobels reward individuals...
From ACM News
The Coming Software Apocalypse
There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service.
From ACM Opinion
What, Exactly, Were Russians Trying to Do With Those Facebook Ads?
Many questions remain about the ads purchased by Russian-linked accounts during the 2016 presidential election.
From ACM Opinion
Is There Any Hope For Facebook's Fact-Checking Efforts?
Facebook's fact-checking efforts are on the rocks.
From ACM Opinion
You Are Already Living Inside a Computer
Suddenly, everything is a computer. Phones, of course, and televisions. Also toasters and door locks, baby monitors and juicers, doorbells and gas grills. Even ...
From ACM Opinion
When Companies Get Hacked, Should They Be Allowed to Hack Back?
There is an old debate (at least, counting in internet years) that tends to crop up after major cybersecurity breaches such as the widespread WannaCry ransomware...
From ACM Opinion
Donald Trump's 'impenetrable Cybersecurity' Is Pure Fantasy
Nothing connected to the internet is safe from hackers. And I mean nothing.
From ACM Opinion
For Google, Everything Is a Popularity Contest
When I saw that Google had introduced a "Classic Papers" section of Google Scholar, its search tool for academic journals, I couldn't help but stroke my chin professorially...
From ACM Opinion