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
Apple's Deep Learning Curve
In the world of artificial intelligence, one of the year's biggest coming-out parties is the Neural Information Processing Systems conference.
From ACM Opinion
Why Fully Autonomous Robot Cars Hail from the 20th Century
A vision of fully autonomous, self-driving cars allowing human owners to nap or read in the car seems to come from the future.
From ACM Opinion
We Don't Need Humans on Mars
The two mobile robots Spirit and Opportunity were launched from Earth in 2003 and arrived on opposite sides of Mars in 2004. A suite of cameras, instruments, and...
From ACM Opinion
Fight Isis By Thinking Inside the Bot
What if we told you that fighting ISIS could be done cheaply, relatively easily, in a manner that would not escalate or put any in harm’s way?
From ACM Opinion
What Machines Can Learn from People and We Can Learn from Them
Guruduth Banavar is an executive at IBM leading the team developing a new generation of cognitive systems—don't call it artificial intelligence—known as Watson.
From ACM Opinion
What Science-Fiction Gadget Would Be Most Valuable in Real Life?
Nicole Perlman, screenwriter, Guardians of the Galaxy: As someone who’s both accident-prone and constantly putting her foot in her mouth, my first thought is the...
From ACM Opinion
Two Paths Toward Our Robot Future
In 1970, Life magazine published an article about a Stanford University research project that had resulted in the construction of what it called the first-ever...
From ACM Opinion
How Tetris Explains the Promise of the ltimate Algorithm
Pedro Domingos is a serious guy with big ambitions.
From ACM Opinion
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love A.i.
The distinction between man and machine is under siege.
From ACM Opinion
We're on the Brink of a Revolution in Crazy-Smart Digital Assistants
Here's a quick story you’ve probably heard before, followed by one you probably haven't.
From ACM Opinion
Facebook's Cyborg Virtual Assistant Is Learning from Its Trainers
Late last month a few hundred lucky users of Facebook's mobile messaging app got an unusual new contact to talk with: M, a virtual assistant powered by a mixture...
From ACM Opinion
Brynjolfsson and Mcafee: The Jobs that AI Can't Replace
At the heart of capitalism is the concept of creative destruction.
From ACM Opinion
Do We Need to Prepare For the Robot prising?
For most of my life, I've been disappointed in robots.
From ACM Opinion
Making AI Work in the Real World
Until recently, AI seemed firmly stuck in the realm of science fiction.
From ACM Opinion
Mark Zuckerberg and the End of Language
Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg hosted an online Q&A session on his personal Facebook page.
From ACM Opinion
Why Neuroscience Needs Hackers
There was a time when neuroscientists could only dream of having such a problem.
From ACM Opinion
How Close Are We Really to a Robot-Run Society?
From Rosie, the Jetsons' robot maid, to Arnold Schwarzenegger's cyborg in The Terminator, popular culture has frequently conceived of robots as having a human-like...
From ACM Opinion
Move Over, Siri—the Next Generation of Virtual Assistants Is Almost Here
Virtual voice-controlled assistants such as Siri, Cortana and Google Now are magical.
From ACM Opinion
The Amazingly Accurate Futurism of 2001: A Space Odyssey
The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s "2001: A Space Odyssey" documents in nearly scientific detail exactly that: the story of how the iconic science-fiction film came...
From ACM Opinion