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 Shape of Things to Come
In recent months, Sir Jonathan Ive, the forty-seven-year-old senior vice-president of design at Apple—who used to play rugby in secondary school, and still has...
From ACM Opinion
Net Neutrality: How the Government Finally Got It Right
For years, the federal government supported the principle of net neutrality: the idea that broadband providers should treat all Internet traffic the same.
From ACM Opinion
Netflix's Secret Special Algorithm Is a Human
On the opening night of this year's Sundance Film Festival, two films, as usual, had their premières, gaining maximum exposure to reporters and critics.
From ACM Opinion
The World Cracks Down on the Internet
In September of last year, Chinese authorities announced an unorthodox standard to help them decide whether to punish people for posting online comments that are...
From ACM Opinion
Will Moocs Be Flukes?
On July 23rd, 1969, Geoffrey Crowther addressed the inaugural meeting of the Open University, a British institution that had just been created to provide an alternative...
From ACM Opinion
The Holder of Secrets
From the garden terrace of a sixth-floor walkup on a quiet Berlin street, there was a clear view to the TV Tower, in Alexanderplatz.
From ACM Opinion
The Planning Machine
In June, 1972, Ángel Parra, Chile’s leading folksinger, wrote a song titled "Litany for a Computer and a Baby About to Be Born."
From ACM Opinion
The Hazards of Going on Autopilot
At 9:18 P.M. on February 12, 2009, Continental Connection Flight 3407, operated by Colgan Air, took off from Newark International Airport.
From ACM Opinion
Google Bets a Billion Dollars on Twitch
Video gaming differentiates itself from the older forms of escapism—literature, theatre, film, television—with interactivity.
From ACM Opinion
Being a Better Online Reader
Soon after Maryanne Wolf published "Proust and the Squid," a history of the science and the development of the reading brain from antiquity to the twenty-first...
From ACM Opinion
What Your Cell Phone Can't Tell the Police
On May 28th, Lisa Marie Roberts, of Portland, Oregon, was released from prison after serving nine and a half years for a murder she didn't commit.
From ACM Opinion
What Comes After the Turing Test?
Over the weekend, the news broke that a "supercomputer" program called "Eugene Goostman"—an impersonation of a wisecracking, thirteen-year-old Ukranian boy—had...
From ACM Opinion
Do We Really Need to Learn to Code?
"Learn to Code!" This imperative to program seems to be everywhere these days. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg recently donated ten million dollars to Code.org,...
From ACM Opinion
Spy vs. Spy
Last month, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the United States was charging members of the Chinese military with economic espionage.
From ACM Opinion
How a Raccoon Became an Aardvark
In July of 2008, Dylan Breves, then a seventeen-year-old student from New York City, made a mundane edit to a Wikipedia entry on the coati.
From ACM Opinion
"we're at Greater Risk": General Keith Alexander
Since Edward Snowden's revelations about government surveillence, we know more about how the National Security Agency has been interpreting Section 215 of the Patriot...
From ACM Opinion
Can an Algorithm Solve Twitter's Credibility Problem?
On October 29, 2012, when Hurricane Sandy made landfall, I was in my Brooklyn apartment, refreshing Twitter.
From ACM Opinion
Putin's Fear of the Internet
In the mid-nineteen-sixties, Brezhnev's Soviet Union introduced a law aimed at stifling ideological dissent.
From ACM Opinion