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
Looking to Mars to Help Understand Changing Climates
Where now it stands the Plain of Gold did once my river flow.
From ACM Opinion
Turing's Spirit Hovers at a Restored Estate
When "Captain Ridley's shooting party" gathered here in late August 1938 as weekend guests at Bletchley Park, a Buckinghamshire country house, they were accompanied...
From ACM Careers
For Rosetta Mission's Scientists, the Thrill Is in the Comet Chase
Claudia Alexander has spent the last 15 years of her life waiting for this moment: landing a spacecraft the size of a washing machine on the surface of a speeding...
From ACM Opinion
Artificial Intelligence as a Threat
Ebola sounds like the stuff of nightmares. Bird flu and SARS also send shivers down my spine.
From ACM Opinion
Christine Kenneally's 'invisible History of the Human Race'
Of Christine Kenneally’s father’s father—a man neither Kenneally nor her father ever knew, a man who did the deed requisite to reproduction and promptly vanished—she...
From ACM Opinion
To Siri, With Love
Just how bad a mother am I? I wondered, as I watched my 13-year-old son deep in conversation with Siri.
From ACM Careers
The Google Formula For Success
Can Google’s winning ways be applied to all kinds of businesses?
From ACM Opinion
Why Is Our Sci-Fi So Glum About A.i.?
When I was 12, I invented a superhero named Boy Genius, a guy my age who awakens one morning with access to 100 percent of his brain power.
From ACM Opinion
Apple's Watch Will Make People and Computers More Intimate
A fundamental quest of the digital age has been to make our devices more personal.
From ACM Opinion
A nified Theory
For the last half-century we've had a popular notion that our intellectual culture is sundered in two—the literary and the scientific.
From ACM Opinion
Where Tech Is Taking s: A Conversation With Intel's Genevieve Bell
Genevieve Bell grew up among Aboriginal people in Australia, taught anthropology at Stanford and for the past 16 years has worked for Intel.
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Robot Caregivers
Each time I make a house call, I stay much longer than I should.
From ACM Opinion
The Trouble With Brain Science
Are we ever going to figure out how the brain works?
From ACM Opinion
Larry Page on Google's Many Arms
One way to think of Google is as an extremely helpful, all-knowing, hyper-intelligent executive assistant.
From ACM Opinion
Searching For Answers in Very Old Dna
As he puts it in the subtitle of his memoir, "Neanderthal Man," Svante Paabo goes in search of lost genomes.
From ACM Opinion
Jonathan Ive on Apple's Design Process and Product Philosophy
When Steven P. Jobs led Apple, he created a core principle for the company's designers and engineers: stay fully focused on making great products.
From ACM Opinion
Every Little Byte Counts
In "On What We Can Not Do," a short and pungent essay published a few years ago, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben outlined two ways in which power operates...
From ACM Opinion