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 Communications of the ACM
Tom Kilburn: A Tale of Five Computers
Reflections on a British computer engineer who influenced several important machines, including the first stored-program computer.
From ACM Opinion
I Didn't Type This Article
I'm dictating it to my iPhone as I walk down the busy city street on the way to my office in the West Village.
From ACM Opinion
How America's Leading Science Fiction Authors Are Shaping Your Future
Stories set in the future are often judged, as time passes, on whether they come true or not.
From ACM News
What Makes an Alien Intelligent?
On Thursday, astronomers announced that they'd reached a new milestone in the search for Earth's "twin," or a planet much like ours that orbits in what's known...
From ACM Opinion
If the Robots Kill s, It's Because It's Their Job
In the movie Transcendence, which opens in theaters on Friday, a sentient computer program embarks on a relentless quest for power, nearly destroying humanity in...
From ACM Opinion
Captchas Are Becoming Security Theater
CAPTCHAs are a time-worn way for humans to tell computers that we are human.
From ACM Opinion
Google Wants to Make 'science Fiction' a Reality—and That's Limiting Their Imagination
Self-driving cars, extreme life extension, and global wifi provided by weather balloons: Google makes projects that sound like science fiction into reality at its...
From ACM Opinion
Can We Really pload Johnny Depp's Brain?
When Wally Pfister's Transcendence is released on April 17, millions of moviegoers will be asking themselves, "Could we really upload Johnny Depp into a computer...
From ACM Opinion
The Story of Cortana, Microsoft's Siri Killer
Technically, Cortana isn't supposed to exist for at least another 500 years, but that's not stopping Microsoft from bringing her to life this week.
From ACM Opinion
Bots on the Beat
On March 24 at 2:36 p.m., the New York Post reported that the body of former Nets basketball player Quinton Ross had been found in a shallow grave on Long Island...
From ACM Opinion
Hey, Robot: Which Cat Is Cuter?
One recent morning, while contemplating writing this column, I scrolled through thousands and thousands of listings for mundane microgigs on Mechanical Turk, or...
From ACM Opinion
The Dream of Intelligent Robot Friends
Karotz is an Internet-enabled console in the shape of an abstracted rabbit.
From Communications of the ACM
Is Multicore Hardware For General-Purpose Parallel Processing Broken?
The current generation of general-purpose multicore hardware must be fixed to support more application domains and to allow cost-effective parallel programming.
From ACM Opinion
Roomba Creator: Robot Doubles Need More Charisma
Colin Angle is co-founder and CEO of iRobot in Bedford, Massachusetts.
From ACM Opinion
Why Google Doesn't Have a Research Lab
Research vice presidents at some computing giants, such as Microsoft and IBM, rule over divisions housed in dedicated facilities carefully insulated from the rat...
From ACM News
The Future of Brain Implants
What would you give for a retinal chip that let you see in the dark or for a next-generation cochlear implant that let you hear any conversation in a noisy restaurant...
From ACM Opinion
Why You Should Embrace Surveillance, Not Fight It
I once worked with Steven Spielberg on the development of Minority Report, derived from the short story by Philip K. Dick featuring a future society that uses surveillance...
From ACM Opinion
Why Robots Will Not Be Smarter Than Humans By 2029
In the last few days we've seen a spate of headlines like 2029: the year when robots will have the power to outsmart their makers, all occasioned by an Observer...
From ACM Opinion