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 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
Two Paths Toward Our Robot Future
In 1970, Life magazine published an article about a Stanford University research project that had resulted in the construction of what it called the first-ever...
From ACM Opinion
A Beginner's Guide to Invisibility
It is possible, according to many sources, to become invisible, but you must be patient, methodical, and willing to eat almost anything.
From ACM Opinion
In Search of the Keys to the Virtual City
I'm not the first man to believe that he might fix London.
From ACM Opinion
What Is Elegance in Science?
In 1957, a few years after Francis Crick co-discovered the DNA double helix and a few years before he co-won a Nobel Prize for doing so, he published a paper on...
From ACM Opinion
Why Larry Page Is Stepping Away
In the ten years that I’ve been watching him, Larry Page has always wanted to play by his own rules.
From ACM Opinion
Passing Pluto
Soon after the New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Pluto, at 7:49 A.M. on Tuesday—seventy-two seconds ahead of schedule, after a nine-and-a-half...
From ACM Opinion
Project Exodus
On March 27th, an American astronaut named Scott Kelly blasted off from Earth and, six hours later, clambered onto the International Space Station.
From ACM Opinion
New Ways to Crash the Market
Five years ago, on the afternoon of May 6, 2010, the Dow and the S. & P. fell more than six per cent in a matter of minutes, losing a trillion dollars in value.
From ACM Opinion
Sight nseen (the Hows and Whys of Invisibility)
It is possible, according to many sources, to become invisible, but you must be patient, methodical, and willing to eat almost anything.
From ACM Opinion
Germanwings Flight 9525, Technology, and the Question of Trust
Shortly before the dreadful crash of Germanwings Flight 9525, I happened to be reading part of "The Second Machine Age," a book by two academics at M.I.T., Erik...
From ACM Opinion