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
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
Russia Is Pushing to Control Cyberspace. We Should All Be Worried.
Russia's cyber-meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election has been accompanied by what U.S. and European experts describe as a worrisome Kremlin campaign to...
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
Pioneering Virtual Reality and New Video Technologies in Journalism
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Marcelle Hopkins, deputy video editor and co-director of virtual reality...
From ACM Opinion
The 15 Most Influential Websites of All Time
The web, or "world wide web" as we used to say, turns 27 years old on December 20. On that date, nearly three decades ago, British engineer and scientist Tim Berners...
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
Kitchen of the Future: Smart and Fast but Not Much Fun
Wandering among the engineers and strategy directors and managers of something called "connected customer experience" at the Smart Kitchen Summit, one had to wonder...
From ACM Opinion
Provoking Iran Could Have nseen Cyber Consequences
On Friday, President Trump announced that he will not certify Iran's cooperation with the 2015 nuclear agreement negotiated by the Obama Administration.
From ACM Opinion
Would You Buy a Self-Driving Future From These Guys?
When the owner of an automated Tesla was killed in a crash last year, the carmaker's founder, Elon Musk, urged journalists to peer into the future.
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Dna Sequencing
Forty years ago, two papers1, 2 described the first tractable methods for determining the order of the chemical bases in stretches of DNA. Before these 1977 publications...
From ACM Opinion
The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions
We are surrounded by hysteria about the future of artificial intelligence and robotics—hysteria about how powerful they will become, how quickly, and what they...
From ACM Opinion
What Facebook Did to American Democracy
In the media world, as in so many other realms, there is a sharp discontinuity in the timeline: before the 2016 election, and after.
From ACM Opinion