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
His 2020 Campaign Message: The Robots Are Coming
Among the many, many Democrats who will seek the party's presidential nomination in 2020, most probably agree on a handful of core issues: protecting DACA, rejoining...
From ACM Opinion
Computational Propaganda: Bots, Targeting, and the Future
A long time ago, when I was working on my Ph.D. research, I learned to use supercomputers to track the complex 3-D motions of gas blown into space by dying stars...
From ACM Opinion
Welcome to the Post-Text Future
I'll make this short: The thing you're doing now, reading prose on a screen, is going out of fashion.
From ACM Opinion
Mourning John Perry Barlow, the Bard of the Internet
When I first met John Perry Barlow, we became instant soulmates. While that sentence is true for me, it also applies to probably 10,000 other people.
From ACM Opinion
What It's Like to Fly in the Bermuda Triangle of Space
"Before I became an astronaut, I had seen stories of astronauts who had seen white flashes from radiation while they flew in space," says Terry Virts, a former...
From ACM Opinion
Your Mobile Phone Can Give Away Your Location, Even If You Tell It Not to
U.S. military officials were recently caught off guard by revelations that servicemembers' digital fitness trackers were storing the locations of their workouts—including...
From ACM Opinion
Is Tech Dividing America?
When Americans consider how technology has changed their lives, they tend to focus on how the internet and smartphones have altered how they watch TV, connect with...
From ACM Opinion
Why Cops Won't Need a Warrant to Pull the Data Off Your Autonomous Car
Lt. Saul Jaeger, who commands the traffic unit at the Mountain View Police Department, remembers the first time a few years ago when he was given a demo of Waymo's...
From ACM Opinion
Our Hackable Political Future
Imagine it is the spring of 2019. A bottom-feeding website, perhaps tied to Russia, "surfaces" video of a sex scene starring an 18-year-old Kirsten Gillibrand. ...
From ACM Opinion
How to Design a New Chip on a Budget
We recently had an interesting exchange with bunnie Huang, hardware guru and creator of Chumby, NetTV, and the Novena laptop, among other things. He's also theHacking...
From ACM Opinion
Want Awesome Robots? You'll Have to Best These Challenges
We are living in the midst of a profound technological restructuring of human society. The machines that once only frolicked in science fiction have begun to infiltrate...
From ACM Opinion
What China's Frightening Digital Strategy Portends For America's Future
If we were given the capacity to track and feel one another's emotions, would we behave better?
From ACM Opinion
Making Sense of Bitcoin and Its Wild Price Ride
The initial price of Bitcoin, set in 2010, was less than 1 cent.
From ACM Opinion
5 Ways Election Interference Could (and Probably Will) Worsen in 2018 and Beyond
If you thought 2016 was bad, just wait for the sequel.
From ACM Opinion
Bubble, Bubble, Fraud and Trouble
The other day my barber asked me whether he should put all his money in Bitcoin. And the truth is that if he'd bought Bitcoin, say, a year ago he'd be feeling pretty...
From ACM Opinion
Technology to Watch in 2018
For all the excitement surrounding the gene-editing tool CRISPR, it is not that efficient or precise. It's hard to make many changes at once.
From ACM Opinion
My Pacemaker Is Tracking Me from Inside My Body
A month before turning 34, I received an unexpected birthday gift: a cloud-connected pacemaker.
From ACM Opinion
For AI to Get Creative, It Must Learn the Rules, Then How to Break 'em
American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "Every artist was first an amateur." He likely never thought those words would apply to machines.
From ACM Opinion