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
It's Not Technology That's Disrupting Our Jobs
When we learn about the Industrial Revolution in school, we hear a lot about factories, steam engines, maybe the power loom.
From ACM Opinion
How D-Wave's Quantum Machine Could Help Exotic Physics
Picture a computer. Now I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you were probably thinking of your laptop, or maybe even your smartphone if you're being smart...
From ACM Opinion
Future Elections May Be Swayed by Intelligent, Weaponized Chatbots
The battle against propaganda bots is an arm's race for our democracy. It's one we may be about to lose.
From ACM Opinion
Welcome to the Age of Privacy Nihilism
A barista gets burned at work, buys first-aid cream at Target, and later that day sees a Facebook ad for the same product.
From Communications of the ACM
When Machine Learning is Facially Invalid
Observations on the use of machine learning and facial inferences to classify people using inexplicable data.
From ACM Opinion
I Just Hacked a State Election. I'm 17. And I'm Not Even a Very Good Hacker.
It took me around 10 minutes to crash the upcoming midterm elections.
From ACM Opinion
Who Needs Democracy When You Have Data?
In 1955, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published a short story about an experiment in "electronic democracy," in which a single citizen, selected to represent...
From ACM Opinion
A Bold Mission to Touch the Sun
On Sunday, August 12, NASA launched a bold mission to fly directly into the sun's atmosphere, with a spacecraft named the Parker Solar Probe, after solar astrophysicist...
From ACM Opinion
Billion-Dollar Telescopes Could End p Beyond the Reach of S Astronomers
Every ten years, US astronomers set research priorities for the following decade.
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Television Is … More Television
Call it Jeffrey Katzenberg's unicorn newborn. An operating company has come into being, ex nihilo, with the blandest of names—NewTV—and a valuation north of $1...
From ACM Opinion
Are Blockchains the Answer for Secure Elections? Probably Not
With the U.S. heading into a pivotal midterm election, little progress has been made on ensuring the integrity of voting systems—a concern that retook the spotlight...
From ACM Opinion
Honoring the '80s, Def Con's Badge Is also a Text Adventure
Nearly 30,000 people came to Las Vegas last week for the 26th edition of DEF CON, the iconic security conference. And no small amount of the mental energy of that...
From ACM Opinion
Hackers Are Out to Jeopardize Your Vote
Russian hackers targeted US electoral systems during the 2016 presidential election.
From ACM Opinion
To Win the AI Race, We Need More Humans
The United States is trying to develop a national strategy on artificial intelligence (AI) but is ignoring its single greatest advantage: many of the world's brightest...
From ACM Opinion
Why AI Researchers Shouldn't Turn Their Backs on the Military
More than 2,400 AI researchers recently signed a pledge promising not to build so-called autonomous weapons—systems that would decide on their own whom to kill....
From ACM Opinion
We Are Merging With Robots. That's a Good Thing.
Here are some things that are true today:
From ACM Opinion
Google Tracks You Even If Location History's Off. Here's How to Stop It
If, like most people, you thought Google stopped tracking your location once you turned off Location History in your account settings, you were wrong.
From ACM Opinion
How Your Brain Tricks You Into Believing Fake News
Sitting in front of a computer not long ago, a tenured history professor faced a challenge that billions of us do every day: deciding whether to believe something...
From ACM Opinion
AI for Cybersecurity Is a Hot New Thing, and a Dangerous Gamble
When I walked around the exhibition floor at this week's massive Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, I was struck by the number of companies boasting...
From ACM Opinion