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 Simple Question Nobody's Asking About Net Neutrality
President Obama rattled the internet this week when he unloaded his opinion on net neutrality, the notion that all internet traffic should be treated equally.
From ACM Opinion
A Sad Fact of Life: It's Actually Smart to Be Mean Online
I'm generally upbeat on Twitter. Many of my posts are enthusiastic blurts about science or research in which I use way too many exclamation points!!
From ACM Opinion
The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally nleashed AI on the World
A few months ago I made the trek to the sylvan campus of the IBM research labs in Yorktown Heights, New York, to catch an early glimpse of the fast-arriving, long...
From ACM Opinion
Is Apple Watch's Pressure-Sensitive Screen a Bigger Deal Than the Gadget Itself?
Forget about the iPhone 6 Plus, Apple Pay and even the company's bold step into wearables.
From ACM Opinion
On Death and Ipods: A Requiem
Have you ever loved a car? Maybe it was an old truck you drove for hundreds of thousands of miles, or maybe it was your very first car: where you had your very...
From ACM Opinion
The Man Who Will Build Google's Elusive Quantum Computer
John Martinis is one of the world's foremost experts on quantum computing, a growing field of science that aims to process information at super high speeds using...
From ACM Opinion
Robot Servants Are Going to Make Your Life Easy. Then They'll Ruin It
Jibo, the "world's first family robot," hit the media hype machine like a bomb.
From ACM Opinion
How to Save the Net: Keep It Open
For all of its history, the Internet has enjoyed the fruits of an openness principle: the idea that anyone can reach any site online and that information and data...
From ACM Opinion
The Engineer of the Original Apple Mouse Talks About His Remarkable Career
Jim Yurchenco was responsible for squeezing the guts inside the impossibly slim Palm V.
From ACM Opinion
I Liked Everything I Saw on Facebook For Two Days. Here's What It Did to Me
There's this great Andy Warhol quote you’ve probably seen before: "I think everybody should like everybody."
From ACM Opinion
This Sci-Fi Author Thinks Amazon Will Cause an Apocalypse
Charles Stross is an award-winning science fiction author whose books include The Bloodline Feud, about timeline-hopping narco-terrorists, Halting State, a near...
From ACM Opinion
The Data Centers of Tomorrow Will se the Same Tech Our Phones Do
The mobile revolution has spread beyond the mini supercomputers in our hands all the way to the data center.
From ACM Opinion
The Weird Reasons Why People Make p False Identities on the Internet
Sockpuppetry—using false identities for deception—is centuries old, but the advent of the web has made creating sockpuppets, and falling for their tricks, easier...
From ACM Opinion
When Robots Come For Our Jobs, Will We Be Ready to Outsmart Them?
Non-human employees are filling positions in all sorts of workplaces, and they are proving themselves to be fast, accurate, and reliable—more so than their human...
From ACM Opinion
The Fasinatng … Frustrating … Fascinating History of Autocorrect
Invoke the word autocorrect and most people will think immediately of its hiccups—the sort of hysterical, impossible errors one finds collected on sites like Damn...
From ACM Opinion
The Moral Hazards and Legal Conundrums of Our Robot-Filled Future
The robots are coming, and they're getting smarter.
From ACM Opinion
The Oculus Rift Game That's So Real It Nearly Destroyed Me
I can hear the alien breathing.
From ACM Opinion
The Troubling Truth of Why It's Still So Hard to Share Files Directly
It's not always easy to spot the compromises in the technology we use, where we've allowed corporate interests to trump public ideals like privacy and press freedom...
From ACM Opinion
What Everyone Gets Wrong in the Debate Over Net Neutrality
Even Sunday night HBO watchers are worried the Federal Communications Commission will soon put an end to net neutrality.
From ACM Opinion