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
Why Silicon Valley Must Go to War
Should technologists prevent their tools from being used to wage war? This question was answered with a furious yes at Google recently, when more than 3,000 employees ...
From ACM Opinion
AI Can Help Cybersecurity, If It Can Fight Through the Hype
Walking the enormous exhibition halls at the recent RSA security conference in San Francisco, you could have easily gotten the impression that digital defense was...
From ACM Opinion
Forging Voices and Faces: The Dangers of Audio and Video Fabrication
In 1963, before he could give the speech he'd prepared for his trip to Dallas, U.S. president John F. Kennedy was assassinated. In March 2018, a company re-created...
From ACM Opinion
Alexa, How Do We Take Our Relationship to the Next Level?
As useful as it would be to interact with smartphones and other gadgets by chatting casually with them, the technology to enable such a simple but meaningful back...
From ACM Opinion
Autonomous Weapons Would Take Warfare to a New Domain, Without Humans
Killer robots have been a staple of TV and movies for decades, from Westworld to The Terminator series. But in the real world, killer robots are officially known...
From Communications of the ACM
The March Into the Black Hole of Complexity
Addressing the root causes of rapidly increasing software complexity.
From ACM Opinion
The Illusion of Time
According to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: our naive perception of its flow doesn't correspond to physical reality.
From ACM Opinion
A Brand-New Version of Our Origin Story
For over a decade, National Geographic's Genographic Project has been collecting saliva samples from willing participants, analyzing small pieces of their mother's...
From ACM Opinion
'2001: A Space Odyssey': What It Means, and How It Was Made
Fifty years ago this spring, Stanley Kubrick's confounding sci-fi masterpiece, "2001: A Space Odyssey," had its premières across the country.
From ACM Opinion
If (Virtual) Reality Feels Almost Right, It's Exactly Wrong
We can all remember the crisply beveled edges of our cheery-yellow No. 2 pencil, the cool, smooth feel of a chalk-powdered blackboard, the gritty red bricks of...
From ACM Opinion
Why Silicon Valley Shouldn't Work With the Pentagon
Is Silicon Valley going to war?
From ACM Opinion
Here's How Hackers Could Cause Chaos in This Year's S Midterm Elections
On November 6, Americans will head to the polls to vote in the congressional midterm elections. In the months before the contest, hordes of foreign hackers will...
From ACM Opinion
What the History of Math Can Teach s About the Future of AI
Whenever an impressive new technology comes along, people rush to imagine the havoc it could wreak on society, and they overreact. Today we see this happening with...
From ACM Opinion
Regulate Artificial Intelligence to Avert Cyber Arms Race
Cyberattacks are becoming more frequent, sophisticated and destructive. Each day in 2017, the United States suffered, on average, more than 4,000 ransomware attacks...
From ACM Opinion
A Revealer of Secrets in the Data of Life and the niverse
In statistics, abstract math meets real life. To find meaning in unruly sets of raw numbers, statisticians like Donald Richards first look for associations: statistical...
From ACM Opinion
Three Problems with Facebook's Plan to Kill Hate Speech sing AI
Mark Zuckerberg told the US Congress this week that Facebook will increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to catch hate speech spread on the platform.
From ACM Opinion
The Era of Fake Video Begins
In a dank corner of the internet, it is possible to find actresses from Game of Thrones or Harry Potter engaged in all manner of sex acts. Or at least to the world...
From ACM Opinion
Bitcoin Would Be a Calamity, Not an Economy
Earlier this year, Jack Dorsey, cofounder of Twitter and CEO of Square, declared that Bitcoin would become the world's "single currency" within a decade.
From ACM Opinion
New Brain Maps With nmatched Detail May Change Neuroscience
Sitting at the desk in his lower campus office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the neuroscientist Tony Zador turned his computer monitor toward me to show off...
From ACM Opinion