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
Don't Fight the Robots. Tax Them.
When Bill Gates floated the idea of imposing a tax on robots a couple of years ago, Lawrence Summers, a former top economic adviser to President Barack Obama, called...
From ACM Opinion
The Two Codes Your Kids Need to Know
A few years ago, the leaders of the College Board, the folks who administer the SAT college entrance exam, asked themselves a radical question: Of all the skills...
From ACM Opinion
How Silicon Valley Puts the 'Con' in Consent
The average person would have to spend 76 working days reading all of the digital privacy policies they agree to in the span of a year. Reading Amazon's terms and...
From ACM Opinion
To Cover China, There's No Substitute for WeChat
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Li Yuan, a technology columnist in Hong Kong, discussed the tech she's...
From ACM Opinion
The Tech That Was Fixed in 2018 and the Tech That Still Needs Fixing
Personal technology was so awful this year that nobody would think you were paranoid if you dug a hole and buried your computer, phone and smart speaker under six...
From ACM Opinion
The Robots Have Descended on Trump Country
The growing use of work robots and the deployment of artificial intelligence have been most disruptive in just those areas of the country that provided President...
From ACM Opinion
Can the .S. Stop China From Controlling the Next Internet Age?
Imagine, if you will (and you should), a big American tech executive being detained over unspecified charges while on a trip to Beijing.
From ACM Opinion
The End of Privacy Began in the 1960s
In the fall of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson's administration announced a plan to consolidate hundreds of federal databases into one centralized National Data...
From ACM Opinion
The New Radicalization of the Internet
Social media has played a key role in the recent rise of violent right-wing extremism in the United States, including three recent incidents—one in which a man...
From ACM Opinion
How Will We Outsmart A.I. Liars?
During the summer before the 2016 presidential election, John Seymour and Philip Tully, two researchers with ZeroFOX, a security company in Baltimore, unveiled...
From ACM Opinion
At China’s Internet Conference, a Darker Side of Tech Emerges
Every year at the World Internet Conference, held since 2014 in the photogenic canal town of Wuzhen near Shanghai, companies and government officials have convened ...
From ACM Opinion
Artificial Intelligence Hits the Barrier of Meaning
You've probably heard that we're in the midst of an A.I. revolution.
From ACM Opinion
What Isaac Asimov Taught s About Predicting the Future
In February, the spaceflight company founded by Elon Musk conducted a test launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket, which successfully sent its payload into orbit around...
From ACM Opinion
No, A.I. Won't Solve the Fake News Problem
In his testimony before Congress this year, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, addressed concerns about the strategically disseminated misinformation...
From ACM Opinion
There May Soon Be Three Internets. America's Won't Necessarily Be the Best.
In September, Eric Schmidt, the former Google chief executive and Alphabet chairman, said that in the next 10 to 15 years, the internet would most likely be split...
From ACM Opinion
A Future Where Everything Becomes a Computer Is as Creepy as You Feared
More than 40 years ago, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft with a vision for putting a personal computer on every desk.
From ACM Opinion
Introducing the Internet Bill of Rights
Should American citizens get a new Bill of Rights for the internet?
From ACM Opinion
When Reporting on Defcon, Avoid Stereotypes and A.T.M.s
As one of The New York Times's three Surfacing residents, I've grown accustomed to entering unfamiliar places.
From ACM Opinion