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
If the Supreme Court Tackles the Nsa in 2015, It'll Be One of These Five Cases
Roughly a year and a half since the first Snowden disclosures, there's already been a judicial order to shut down the National Security Agency's bulk metadata collection...
From ACM News
2014 in Computing: Breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence
The holy grail of artificial intelligence—creating software that comes close to mimicking human intelligence—remains far off. But 2014 saw major strides in machine...
From ACM News
This Year's 8 Smartest i Design Ideas
When your family gathered for the holidays this year, did you take note of the technology everyone was using?
From ACM Opinion
A Q&a With the Hackers Who Say They Helped Break Into Sony's Network
Lizard Squad. That's the hacker group whose name is suddenly on everyone's lips after it took credit for ruining Christmas for PlayStation and Xbox gamers everywhere...
From ACM Opinion
Are These the Five Craziest Space Missions?
The landing of the Philae Lander—on a comet travelling at 135,000km/h (84,000mph)—has been hailed as the start of a new chapter in space exploration.
From ACM Opinion
North Korea and Cyberterrorists Won Big in Sony Hack, Researcher Says
It looks like the great cyber-war with North Korea has begun, at least by proxy.
From ACM Opinion
Fear Artificial Stupidity, Not Artificial Intelligence
It is not often that you are obliged to proclaim a much-loved genius wrong, but in his alarming prediction on artificial intelligence and the future of humankind...
From ACM Opinion
Comet Breakthrough of the Year + People's Choice
This year's breakthrough captured the public's imagination with a series of hard-won pictures, beamed to Earth from a place beyond Mars.
From ACM Opinion
The Lesson of the Sony Hack: We Should All Jump to the 'erasable Internet'
This month's news provides yet another occasion for a friendly public-service reminder to anyone who uses a digital device to say anything to anyone, ever.
From ACM Opinion
The Sony Hackers Are Terrorists
The Sony Pictures hack is important, and the Sony Pictures hack is terrifying.
From ACM Opinion
William Gibson Sees the Future
"The thing to keep in mind," William Gibson tells me when we meet in the quiet lounge of a Victorian-style hotel in Chicago, "is that I’m not actually predicting...
From ACM Opinion
Dumbing It Down in the Cockpit
Long gone are the leather jackets, goggles, and silk scarves flung over the shoulders of aviators who wrestled with flight controls, furiously scanned instruments...
From ACM Opinion
Forget Turing—i Want to Test Computer Creativity
What are the elements of the Turing test?
From ACM Opinion
What Are Moocs Good For?
A few years ago, the most enthusiastic advocates of MOOCs believed that these "massive open online courses" stood poised to overturn the century-old model of higher...
From ACM Opinion
Artificial Intelligence Isn't a Threat—Yet
Does artificial intelligence threaten our species, as the cosmologist Stephen Hawking recently suggested?
From ACM Opinion
Boston Researcher Cynthia Breazeal Is Ready to Bring Robots Into the Home. Are You?
The MIT Media Lab's Personal Robots Group flanks the soaring atrium on the fourth floor of the Wiesner Building, a wall of metal panels along the southern edge...
From ACM Opinion
We Might Be Able to 3-D-Print an Artificial Mind One Day
I'm an artificial-intelligence skeptic.
From ACM Opinion