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
What If We Had Perfect Robot Referees
Last month, Mark Clattenburg, who is generally regarded as one of the finest referees in professional soccer, left England's Premier League for a better-paying...
From ACM Opinion
Reality Bites: Learning the Future of V.r. at Sundance
Standing in a pink desert landscape, I looked down and realized I'd become a robot, with skinny metal legs and pincers for hands.
From ACM Opinion
Nasa's Overlooked Duty to Look Inward
In 1942, not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the poet Archibald MacLeish wrote an essay called "The Image of Victory," in which he asked what winning the...
From ACM Opinion
The Hype, and Hope, of Artificial Intelligence
Earlier this month, on his HBO show "Last Week Tonight," John Oliver skewered media companies' desperate search for clicks.
From ACM Opinion
Space, Climate Change, and the Real Meaning of Theory
I used to be an astronaut, a spacewalker on the International Space Station.
From ACM Opinion
Why Facebook Is Really Blocking the Ad Blockers
Ads can seem like the bane of the Internet.
From ACM Opinion
All Alone in No Man's Sky
If reality is a game—a vast, snow-globe-y sort of experiment that plays out according to the hard rules of physics and the loose rules of story—then it is, in contemporary...
From ACM Opinion
Could Brain Training Prevent Dementia?
It's been a lousy couple of years for researchers who study the effects of computerized brain training.
From ACM Opinion
Pokémon Go Will Make You Crave Augmented Reality
It started as an April Fool's joke.
From ACM Opinion
Waiting For Gödel
In June of 1975, the Office of the White House Press Secretary announced President Gerald R. Ford’s picks for the National Medal of Science. One went to the Austrian...
From ACM Opinion
What Are the Odds We Are Living in a Computer Simulation?
Last week, Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and other cutting-edge companies, took a surprising question at the Code Conference, a technology...
From ACM Opinion
The Coming Horror of Virtual Reality
If Kitchen, a five-minute virtual-reality demo created by the Japanese studio Capcom, were a short film, few viewers would be moved to panic by its misery of horror...
From ACM Opinion
What Would Happen If G.p.s. Failed?
The radio signal that is the lifeblood of the Global Positioning System originates from a constellation of twenty-four satellites, orbiting more than twelve thousand...
From ACM Opinion
Will Smell Ever Come to Smartphones?
Two years ago, at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, I witnessed David Edwards receive what he claimed was the world's first transatlantic ...
From ACM Opinion
Lessons from Apple vs. the F.b.i.
It's welcome news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has dropped its legal effort to force Apple to help it create a method of accessing data on a lockedSan...
From ACM Opinion
Crosstown Traffic: The Bedbug Genome
In the great contest that is life, the common bedbug, Cimex lectularius, qualifies as a winner.
From ACM Opinion
Werner Herzog Talks Virtual Reality
"I'm a skeptic of 3-D, but when I saw the paintings I knew I had to use it," Werner Herzog told Judith Thurman in 2010, after the New York première of his documentary...
From ACM Opinion
Google's New Autoreply Sounds Great!!!!
On April 1, 2009, Google unveiled Gmail Autopilot, a plug-in that promised to read and generate contextually relevant replies to the messages piling up in users'...
From ACM Opinion
Tangled Up in Entanglement
No area of physics causes more confusion, not just among the general public but also among physicists, than quantum mechanics.
From ACM Opinion