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
Google Bets a Billion Dollars on Twitch
Video gaming differentiates itself from the older forms of escapism—literature, theatre, film, television—with interactivity.
From ACM Opinion
How to Invent a Person Online
On April 8, 2013, I received an envelope in the mail from a nonexistent return address in Toledo, Ohio.
From ACM Opinion
When Robots Come For Our Jobs, Will We Be Ready to Outsmart Them?
Non-human employees are filling positions in all sorts of workplaces, and they are proving themselves to be fast, accurate, and reliable—more so than their human...
From ACM Opinion
How the .s. Stumbled Into the Drone Era
On Sept. 7, 2000, in the waning days of the Clinton administration, a U.S. Predator drone flew over Afghanistan for the first time.
From ACM Opinion
How to Talk About Blowing Things p in Cyberspace, According to the Military
Bombs are relatively simple, when you boil everything down.
From ACM Opinion
The Fasinatng … Frustrating … Fascinating History of Autocorrect
Invoke the word autocorrect and most people will think immediately of its hiccups—the sort of hysterical, impossible errors one finds collected on sites like Damn...
From Communications of the ACM
Slow Search
Seeking to enrich the search experience by allowing for extra time and alternate resources.
From ACM Opinion
Id Shows Off Double-Jumping, Skull-Crushing New Doom at Quakecon
The bad news is that only people who were actually at Dallas' QuakeCon last night were able to see the world-premiere gameplay footage from the next Doom game,...
From ACM Opinion
Bletchley Park's Rebirth and Why It Matters
Twenty five years ago, the historic World War II codebreaking center Bletchley Park faced demolition.
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Robot Caregivers
Each time I make a house call, I stay much longer than I should.
From ACM Opinion
Being a Better Online Reader
Soon after Maryanne Wolf published "Proust and the Squid," a history of the science and the development of the reading brain from antiquity to the twenty-first...
From ACM Opinion
Three Questions For Robotics Inventor Cynthia Breazeal About Social Robots
As an academic, Cynthia Breazeal pioneered research into social interaction between humans and robots, developing Kismet, a robot that used facial expressions in...
From ACM Opinion
The Moral Hazards and Legal Conundrums of Our Robot-Filled Future
The robots are coming, and they're getting smarter.
From ACM Opinion
Take a Virtual Voyage Into Darwin's Library
In his celebrated journey around the world on the HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836, Charles Darwin collected a plethora of information on the geology, animals, plants...
From ACM Opinion
Nsa Implementing Fix to Prevent Snowden-Like Security Breach
A year after Edward Snowden's digital heist, the NSA's chief technology officer says steps have been taken to stop future incidents. But he says there's no way...
From ACM Opinion
The Oculus Rift Game That's So Real It Nearly Destroyed Me
I can hear the alien breathing.
From ACM Opinion
Forget Turing, the Lovelace Test Has a Better Shot at Spotting AI
When a chatbot called Eugene Goostman passed Alan Turing's famous measure of machine intelligence in June by posing as a Ukrainian teenager with questionable language...
From ACM Opinion
The Most Annoying Problem in Computing Is Still Unsolved
When I travel these days, I tend to look like a walking Radio Shack—cords bursting out of my pockets, bag overflowing with chargers and accessories.
From ACM Opinion