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
The Moment I Decided Robots Were As Interesting As Humans
When I was little, I was enamored with the idea of being a pioneer; I was drawn to the thought that I could be the first to do something—be a trailblazer, the forerunner...
From ACM Opinion
Intelligent Life in the niverse? Phone Home, Dammit!
We've been conditioned by television and movies to accept the likelihood of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
From ACM Opinion
Beware the Listening Machines
One of my great pleasures in life is attending conferences on fields I'm intrigued by, but know nothing about.
From ACM Opinion
The Latest Oculus Headset Made Me Want to Throw p. In a Good Way.
Virtual reality and its viability as a consumer technology is a huge theme at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo, a Los Angeles convention for the video...
From ACM Opinion
How the Astros Baseball Hack Explains Chinese Cyberespionage
Two major cybersecurity scandals are currently making headlines: One is the hack of an internal network belonging to a Major League Baseball team, allegedly bya...
From ACM News
Who Will Own the Robots?
The way Hod Lipson describes his Creative Machines Lab captures his ambitions: "We are interested in robots that create and are creative."
From ACM Opinion
No One Questions Google's Ability to Innovate, So Why Do Its Moonshots Look Like Money Pits?
Consider a question that we have been puzzling over at the World Economic Forum.
From ACM News
Facial Recognition Technology Is Everywhere. It May Not Be Legal.
Being anonymous in public might be a thing of the past.
From ACM Opinion
Stop Laughing at Those Clumsy Humanoid Robots
The humanoid robot, built like a linebacker with an oversized head, tiptoes on two feet through the dirt.
From ACM Opinion
Will We Ever… Speak Faster Than Light Speed?
Light travels so fast it can make the transatlantic journey between London and New York more than 50 times each second. With speed like that, you might wonder why...
From ACM Opinion
The Pluto Punch-Through
On July 14, 2015 NASA's New Horizons spacecraft finally reaches Pluto. But the encounter is brief.
From ACM Opinion
Why Robots and Humans Struggled with Darpa's Challenge
When some of the world's most advanced rescue robots are foiled by nothing more complex than a doorknob, you get a good sense of the challenge of making our homes...
From ACM Opinion
The Myth of a Borderless Internet
Almost a decade ago now, McDonald's made a seemingly innocuous decision.
From ACM Opinion
Lust and the Turing Test
By and large, we watch movies to be entertained, not to be provoked into deep thought. Occasionally, a film does both.
From ACM Opinion
Immortal But Damned to Hell on Earth
Imagine a supercomputer so advanced that it could hold the contents of a human brain.
From ACM Opinion
Looking For Creativity in Brains Will Take More Creativity
About a decade and a half ago, the neuroscience world got super-stoked about a sexy new way to look at living brains: functional magnetic resonance imaging.
From ACM Opinion
A Murky Road Ahead For Android, Despite Market Dominance
In 2005, Google bought a tiny mobile software company named Android, and almost nobody in the technology industry saw its potential—not even Eric Schmidt, Google's...
From ACM Opinion
Project Exodus
On March 27th, an American astronaut named Scott Kelly blasted off from Earth and, six hours later, clambered onto the International Space Station.
From ACM Opinion
Behind the Downfall at Blackberry
Ever since Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis stepped down as co-chairmen and co-chief executives of BlackBerry, neither has spoken much in public about the once-dominant...
From ACM Opinion