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
A Framework for Building Artificial Intelligence Capabilities
After decades of promise and hype, artificial intelligence has finally reached a tipping point of market acceptance.
From ACM News
Has Dopamine Got s Hooked on Tech?
In an unprecedented attack of candour, Sean Parker, the 38-year-old founding president of Facebook, recently admitted that the social network was founded not to...
From ACM Opinion
The Limits of Explainability
When we look at a stack of blocks or a stack of Oreos, we intuitively have a sense of how stable it is, whether it might fall over, and in what direction it may...
From ACM Opinion
Tech Companies Should Stop Pretending AI Won't Destroy Jobs
I took an Uber to an artificial-intelligence conference at MIT one recent morning, and the driver asked me how long it would take for autonomous vehicles to take...
From ACM Opinion
This 'Gray Hat' Hacker Breaks Into Your Car, to Prove a Point
Cybercrime is expanding beyond computers and cellphones. Cars, washers and dryers, and even toasters are going online—an evolution of technology called the ...
From Communications of the ACM
The Computing Profession
Taking stock of progress toward a computing profession since this column started in 2001.
From ACM Opinion
How to Make Replication the Norm
Replication is essential for building confidence in research studies, yet it is still the exception rather than the rule.
From ACM Opinion
The Father of the Internet Sees His Invention Reflected Back Through a 'Black Mirror'
In 1984, two men were thinking a lot about the Internet. One of them invented it. The other is an artist who would see its impact on society with uncanny prescience...
From ACM Opinion
China's Dystopian Tech Could Be Contagious
For all the particularities of life in China, its big cities offer a familiar cosmopolitanism.
From ACM Opinion
How Technology Can Make Valentine's Day Much, Much Better
Every February I agonize over the Valentine's Day Dilemma. How can I show my girlfriend, whom I'll call Emily, how much I love her?
From ACM Opinion
Blockchain Explained: It Builds Trust When You Need It Most
These days, we're having a harder and harder time trusting each other.
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
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