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
What We Know About the Climate Change-Hurricane Connection
With Texas just beginning to recover from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Harvey and the Southeastern U.S. preparing for Hurricane Irma's iminent arrival, people...
From ACM Opinion
The Only Safe Email Is text-Only email
It's troubling to think that at any moment you might open an email that looks like it comes from your employer, a relative or your bank, only to fall for a ...
From ACM Opinion
These Are Not the Robots We Were Promised
From the moment we humans first imagined having mechanical servants at our beck and call, we've assumed they would be constructed in our own image.
From ACM Opinion
How Facebook Changed the Spy Game
Any doubt that Russia has been running a strategically targeted disinformation campaign in the United States was erased on Wednesday, when Facebook revealed that...
From ACM Opinion
Irobot Ceo Colin Angle on Data Privacy and Robots in the Home
About a month ago, iRobot CEO Colin Angle mentioned something about sharing Roomba mapping data in an interview with Reuters.
From ACM Opinion
Mark Sagar Made a Baby in His Lab. Now It Plays the Piano
People get up to weird things in New Zealand.
From ACM Opinion
How to Close the Gender Gap in Tech
Why do so few women work in tech? It isn't that they can't do math or are biologically unsuited to the tasks.
From ACM Opinion
The Fake-News Fallacy
On the evening of October 30, 1938, a seventy-six-year-old millworker in Grover's Mill, New Jersey, named Bill Dock heard something terrifying on the radio.
From ACM Opinion
The Darkening Web: Misinformation Is the Strongest Cyberweapon
In late June, I was leaving for a flight from Kiev's Boryspil Airport as news broke that Ukraine was the victim of another massive cyberattack.
From ACM Opinion
What James Damore Got Wrong About Gender Bias in Computer Science
In August Google employee James Damore made the news and even Wikipedia by publishing his speculation that female software engineers are underrepresented due to...
From ACM Opinion
Artificial Intelligence: The Future Is Superintelligent
Max Tegmark is a renowned physicist. He is also the irrepressibly optimistic co-founder of the Future of Life Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts (motto: "Technology...
From ACM Opinion
How We Won Gold in the Cyborg Olympics' Brain Race
In October 2016, inside a sold-out arena in Zurich, a man named Numa Poujouly steered his wheelchair up to the central podium.
From ACM Opinion
Is the Power Grid Getting More Vulnerable to Cyber Attacks?
Two weeks ago it was cyberattacks on the Irish power grid. Last month it was a digital assault on U.S. energy companies, including a nuclear power plant. Back in...
From ACM Opinion
What I Learned at Gerrymandering Summer Camp
At 6'5", Aaron Dennis towers over the whiteboard beside him.
From ACM Opinion
The Myth of the Skills Gap
The contention that America's workers lack the skills employers demand is an article of faith among analysts, politicians, and pundits of every stripe, from conservative...
From ACM Opinion
How the Voyager Golden Record Was Made
We inhabit a small planet orbiting a medium-sized star about two-thirds of the way out from the center of the Milky Way galaxy—around where Track 2 on an LP record...
From ACM Opinion
Blossom: A Handmade Approach to Social Robotics from Cornell and Google
As excited as we are about the forthcoming generation of social home robots (including Jibo, Kuri, and many others), it's hard to ignore the fact that most of them...
From ACM Opinion