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
Do We Need Brain Implants to Keep p with Robots?
Pundits have been fretting a lot lately about robots leaving humans behind, taking our jobs and possibly a lot more, as in The Matrix and Terminator films.
From ACM Opinion
Net States Rule the World; We Need to Recognize Their Power
"We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code." So declared MIT professor David D. Clark in 1992.
From ACM Opinion
Machines Moved By Mind
At Mental Work, an exhibition at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne ArtLab (EPFL), visitors can drive simple machines using the force of their own...
From ACM Opinion
Citation Is Not the Only Impact
What makes good science? And how do Nature's editors select papers to publish?
From ACM Opinion
The Physics of Time Travel Isn't Just the Stuff of Science Fiction
We're all time travelers nowadays. We project ourselves mentally into the misty past and the risky future.
From ACM Opinion
Learning to Spot Fake News: Start with a Gut Check
Which of these statements seems more trustworthy to you?
From ACM Opinion
Behold, the World's Most Famous teapot
Martin Newell was worried about his Ph.D. research as he sat down to tea with his wife one day in 1974.
From ACM Opinion
The End of an Era Came Long Before the End of Cassini
I have now been writing about science for nearly a dozen years, which means my career more or less overlaps with that of the Cassini probe.
From ACM Opinion
5 Star Trek Technologies That Are More Truth Than Science Fiction
It's easy to get sucked in by the wild and wacky science of Star Trek, from beaming and materializing in other places, to the intense blast of deadly light from...
From ACM Opinion
Google's 'quantum Supremacy' Moment May Not Mean What You Think
Any day now, Google is expected to achieve quantum supremacy—the use of a quantum computer to solve a problem that even the most advanced supercomputer can't unravel...
From ACM Opinion
Fiction That Gets AI Right
Even the most futuristic applications of AI, from robotic servants to instant health scans, somehow already seem familiar because they have been endless fodder...
From ACM Opinion
There's No Good Decision in the Next Big Data Privacy Case
In 2013, United States agents served a warrant on Microsoft seeking the emails of a suspect in a drug case.
From ACM Opinion
Driverless Cars Made Me Nervous. Then I Tried One.
On my fourth day in a semi-driverless car, I finally felt comfortable enough to let it stop itself.
From ACM Opinion
Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges--The Aliens Are All Asleep
Anders Sandberg and Stuart Armstrong of the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, working with Milan Ćirković of the University of Novi Sad in Serbia...
From ACM Opinion
The Supreme Court Is Allergic to Math
The Supreme Court does not compute. Or at least some of its members would rather not. The justices, the most powerful jurists in the land, seem to have a reluctance—even...
From ACM Opinion
Smartphones Are Weapons of Mass Manipulation, and This Guy Is Declaring War on Them
If, like an ever-growing majority of people in the U.S., you own a smartphone, you might have the sense that apps in the age of the pocket-sized computer are designed...
From ACM Opinion
Will AI and Blockchain Be Game-Changers?
This week saw another major achievement by Google's Deep Mind, when it showed that a neural network could learn to play Go in just three days, without even looking...
From ACM Opinion
Andrew Ng Has a Chatbot That Can Help with Depression
I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, but I've been seeing a virtual therapist.
From ACM Opinion
Oculus Chief Scientist Speaks About Virtual Reality in the Lab and on Your Face
While many of us are impatient with virtual reality—the best headsets are still too expensive, they need to be tethered to beefy computers, and there isn't all...
From ACM Opinion