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
Synthetic Biology Is … Complex. But This Exhibit Makes It a Blast
It takes at least a master's degree to fully understand synthetic biology, but grasping its importance requires far less.
From ACM Opinion
Why The Fbi Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam
FBI Director James Comey gave a speech this week about encryption and privacy, repeating his argument that "absolute privacy" hampers law enforcement. But it was...
From ACM Opinion
Why Robots Need to Be Able to Say 'no'
Should you always do what other people tell you to do?
From ACM Opinion
Why Apple's Stand Against the F.b.i. Hurts Its Own Customers
Two weeks ago, privacy advocates across the country celebrated as the Federal Bureau of Investigation backed off its request for Apple to help gain access intoiPhone...
From ACM Opinion
The Senate's Draft Encryption Bill Is 'ludicrous, Dangerous, Technically Illiterate'
As Apple Battled the FBI for the last two months over the agency's demands that Apple help crack its own encryption, both the tech community and law enforcement...
From ACM Opinion
The Man Selling Shovels in the Machine-Learning Gold Rush
Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of the chipmaker Nvidia, is either very prescient or very lucky.
From ACM Opinion
When Is the Singularity? Probably Not in Your Lifetime
Misconception: Computers will outstrip human capabilities within many of our lifetimes.
From ACM Opinion
Technology Gone Wild
Birding — the amateur pursuit of watching and monitoring bird populations — is a big deal. The numbers back it up.
From ACM Opinion
What If Apple Is Wrong?
Soon after Devon Godfrey was shot to death in his apartment in Harlem on the evening of April 12, 2010, officers with the New York Police Department thought they...
From ACM Opinion
Lessons from Apple vs. the F.b.i.
It's welcome news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has dropped its legal effort to force Apple to help it create a method of accessing data on a lockedSan...
From ACM Opinion
To Beat Go Champion, Google's Program Needed a Human Army
Nearly 20 years ago, after a chess-playing computer called Deep Blue beat the world grandmaster Garry Kasparov, I wrote an article about why humans would long remain...
From ACM Opinion
Is Alphago Really Such a Big Deal?
In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue system defeated the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov.
From ACM Opinion
Mind Craft
Concerned because you can't pry your daughter away from Minecraft? Worried that your son spends every moment obsessing over moves in the super-popular video game...
From ACM Opinion
se or Lose Our Navigation Skills
In 1984, I was part of a team that was developing a receiver for a satellite-navigation system. After weeks of debugging, the blur of random digits settled on a...
From ACM Opinion
Why a Chatbot Creeped Out Microsoft's AI-Focused Ceo
In February, Microsoft Corp. Vice President Derrick Connell visited the Bing search team in Hyderabad, India, to oversee a Monday morning hackathon.
From ACM Opinion
Should Hackers Help the F.b.i.?
The United States Justice Department announced this week that it was able to unlock the iPhone used by the gunman in the San Bernardino shooting in December, and...
From ACM Opinion
Linux at 25: Q&a With Linus Torvalds
Linus Torvalds created the original core of the Linux operating system in 1991 as a computer science student at the University of Helsinki in Finland.
From ACM Opinion
Andy Grove's Warning to Silicon Valley
The praise this week for Andy Grove, who died on Monday at age 79, has been wrapped up in praise for Silicon Valley, where he was a towering figure in the semiconductor...
From ACM Opinion
Feds Set a Risky Precedent By Indicting 7 Iranian Hackers
This week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) created a potentially dangerous precedent when it indicted seven Iranian hackers involved in attacks on the US financial...
From ACM Opinion