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
I Made an ntraceable 'ghost Gun' in My Office—and It Was Easy
This is my ghost gun. To quote the rifleman's creed, there are many like it, but this one is mine.
From ACM Opinion
Want Your Writing to Look Like Einstein's? Computers Mimic Handwriting of the Famous
Harald Geisler wants to make you as brilliant as Albert Einstein. Or at least let you write like him. Or at least write in his handwriting.
From ACM Opinion
The Military Origins of Wearable Tech, a Century Before the Apple Watch
On July 9, 1916, The New York Times puzzled over a fashion trend: Europeans were starting to wear bracelets with clocks on them.
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
An Npr Reporter Raced a Machine to Write a News Story. Who Won?
Even the most creative jobs have parts that are pretty routine—tasks that, at least in theory, can be done by a machine. Take, for example, being a reporter.
From ACM Opinion
As Congress Haggles Over Patriot Act, We Answer 6 Basic Questions
The rest of the month is setting up to be pretty dramatic in the Senate.
From Communications of the ACM
Created Computed Universe
Computing crosses cosmology and makes the case for agnosticism.
From ACM Opinion
Why Robots Will Always Need S
"Human beings are ashamed to have been born instead of made," wrote the philosopher Günther Anders in 1956. Our shame has only deepened as our machines have grown...
From ACM Opinion
The Second Job You Don’t Know You Have
Technology has knocked the bottom rung out of the employment ladder, which has sent youth unemployment around the globe skyrocketing and presented us with a serious...
From ACM Opinion
Hacking the Brain
The perfectibility of the human mind is a theme that has captured our imagination for centuries—the notion that, with the right tools, the right approach, the right...
From ACM Opinion
How the Battle For the Future of the Web Is Shaped By Economics
There are two stories people are trying to tell right now about the future of the Internet.
From ACM Opinion
Attention White-Collar Workers: The Robots Are Coming For Your Jobs
From the self-checkout aisle of the grocery store to the sports section of the newspaper, robots and computer software are increasingly taking the place of humans...
From ACM Opinion
Crispr Germline Engineering—the Community Speaks
With the first papers appearing in the literature that describe CRISPR-Cas9 engineering of human reproductive cells, are we at a new Asilomar moment?
From ACM Opinion