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 Problem with Easy Technology
In the history of marketing, there's a classic tale that centers on the humble cake mix.
From ACM Opinion
The Interstellar Contract
Last September, the Times reported that Voyager 1, the hardy spacecraft launched in 1977, had exited the solar system and entered the interstellar void.
From ACM Opinion
Why the One Appealing Part of Creationism Is Wrong
Earlier this month, Ken Ham, the founder of the Creation Museum, in Petersburg, Kentucky, held a debate with Bill Nye at the museum.
From ACM Opinion
Starman
It was a mild October day in Hollywood, but a trace of artificial snow remained on the ground as Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium, at...
From ACM Opinion
Making It
In January of 1903, the small Boston magazine Handicraft ran an essay by the Harvard professor Denman W. Ross, who argued that the American Arts and Crafts movement...
From ACM Opinion
Google's Robot Army
A couple of weeks ago, shortly after the Amazon C.E.O. Jeff Bezos unveiled, on "60 Minutes," that his company plans to deliver packages to customers with a swarm...
From ACM News
The Daunting Challenge of Secure Email
When users of Lavabit, an encrypted e-mail service, logged on to the site this past August, they found a bewildering letter on the site's main page.
From ACM Opinion
Why We Should Think About the Threat of Artificial Intelligence
If the New York Times's latest article is to be believed, artificial intelligence is moving so fast it sometimes seems almost "magical."
From ACM Opinion
Is Ad Avoidance a Problem?
Back in the twentieth century, people were roughly equal in their power to avoid advertising.
From ACM Opinion
E-Book Vs. P-Book
When Barnes & Noble announced, a couple of weeks ago, that its Nook division lost almost five hundred million dollars last year and that its C.E.O. was resigning...
From ACM Opinion
What It's Like to Get a National-Security Letter
In the summer of 2011, while he was fighting an indictment for alleged computer crimes, Aaron Swartz, an information activist, read Kafka’s "The Trial" and ...
From ACM Opinion
The Prism
An extraordinary fuss about eavesdropping started in the spring of 1844, when Giuseppe Mazzini, an Italian exile in London, became convinced that the British government...
From ACM Opinion
Strongbox and Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz was not yet a legend when, almost two years ago, I asked him to build an open-source, anonymous in-box.
From ACM News
Laptop
Gregory Nagy, a professor of classical Greek literature at Harvard, is a gentle academic of the sort who, asked about the future, will begin speaking of Homer and...
From ACM Opinion
The Medium of the Moment
After the Boston Marathon bombings, the process by which breaking news and information are generated and disseminated looked more ragged and exposed than ever: ...
From ACM Opinion
The Creator
When Markus Persson visited Las Vegas in 2011, for the first international convention held in honor of Minecraft, the video game he designed and built, a young...
From ACM Opinion