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
North Korea and Cyberterrorists Won Big in Sony Hack, Researcher Says
It looks like the great cyber-war with North Korea has begun, at least by proxy.
From ACM Opinion
Fear Artificial Stupidity, Not Artificial Intelligence
It is not often that you are obliged to proclaim a much-loved genius wrong, but in his alarming prediction on artificial intelligence and the future of humankind...
From ACM Opinion
Comet Breakthrough of the Year + People's Choice
This year's breakthrough captured the public's imagination with a series of hard-won pictures, beamed to Earth from a place beyond Mars.
From ACM Opinion
Sony Made It Easy, but Any of S Could Get Hacked
Earlier this month, a mysterious group that calls itself Guardians of Peace hacked into Sony Pictures Entertainment’s computer systems and began revealing many...
From ACM Opinion
The Sony Hackers Are Terrorists
The Sony Pictures hack is important, and the Sony Pictures hack is terrifying.
From ACM Opinion
From Pc to Navy, Ars Pits Casual Flight Sim Skills Against a Real Cockpit Trainer
A little over a year ago, I was lucky enough to take a short ride in a Folland Gnat trainer—a nimble little two-seat jet maintained by Rick Sharpe of Houston's ...
From ACM Opinion
Dumbing It Down in the Cockpit
Long gone are the leather jackets, goggles, and silk scarves flung over the shoulders of aviators who wrestled with flight controls, furiously scanned instruments...
From ACM Opinion
Forget Turing—i Want to Test Computer Creativity
What are the elements of the Turing test?
From ACM Opinion
Artificial Intelligence Isn't a Threat—Yet
Does artificial intelligence threaten our species, as the cosmologist Stephen Hawking recently suggested?
From ACM Opinion
Boston Researcher Cynthia Breazeal Is Ready to Bring Robots Into the Home. Are You?
The MIT Media Lab's Personal Robots Group flanks the soaring atrium on the fourth floor of the Wiesner Building, a wall of metal panels along the southern edge...
From ACM Opinion
We Might Be Able to 3-D-Print an Artificial Mind One Day
I'm an artificial-intelligence skeptic.
From ACM Opinion
Father of Web Tells Russia's Putin: Internet Is Not a 'cia Project'
The inventor of the World Wide Web said on Thursday that Russian President Vladimir Putin was incorrect when he alleged the Internet was a project created by U.S...
From ACM Opinion
Get Your Head Around the 13 Boldest Ideas in Science
Science is full of mind-blowing and counterintuitive concepts.
From ACM Opinion
Tech's Lost Chapter: An Oral History of Boston's Rise and Fall
In the popular telling, the dawn of personal computing begins in the summer of 1976, when Steve Wozniak showed off the Apple I at a meeting of the Homebrew Computer...
From ACM Opinion
Ransomware Is the Future of Consumer Cybercrime
It's 2020, bitter cold outside, you’re running late for work, and the Linux box that controls your car isn't going to start unless you wire $20 worth of Bitcoin...
From ACM Opinion
Looking to Mars to Help Understand Changing Climates
Where now it stands the Plain of Gold did once my river flow.
From ACM Opinion
Baer's Odyssey: Meet the Serial Inventor Who Built the World's First Game Console
Even if you're a devoted fan of video games, there's a decent chance you're not familiar with the name Ralph H. Baer.
From ACM News
Search Gives s Superpowers
Machine learning—an area of AI focusing on systems that "learn" from data in order to navigate future similar scenarios—is one of the ways we’ve managed to give...
From ACM Opinion
Sure, Artificial Intelligence May End Our World, But That Is Not the Main Problem
The robots will rise, we're told.
From ACM Opinion