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 Communications of the ACM
A Right to Be Forgotten?
Searching for an answer to the question of how much responsibility search engine operators should bear for privacy-related issues connected to search engine results...
From Communications of the ACM
How Traditional Firms Must Compete in the Sharing Economy
Considering the evolving relationship between established companies and their sharing-economy counterparts.
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
Sony Made It Easy, but Any of S Could Get Hacked
Earlier this month, a mysterious group that calls itself Guardians of Peace hacked into Sony Pictures Entertainment’s computer systems and began revealing many...
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
How to Conquer the Galaxy on a Computer
Space is big. Really big. And not just in terms of the mind-boggingly vast distances between the stars and planets out there in the Universe at large.
From ACM Opinion
From Pc to Navy, Ars Pits Casual Flight Sim Skills Against a Real Cockpit Trainer
A little over a year ago, I was lucky enough to take a short ride in a Folland Gnat trainer—a nimble little two-seat jet maintained by Rick Sharpe of Houston's ...
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
The Future of .s. Innovation Might Rest on This Obscure Patent Lawsuit
Patent trolls: They're a huge suck on the economy, eating up untold millions in legal fees and deliberately suing innocent companies just because they're flush....
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
Father of Web Tells Russia's Putin: Internet Is Not a 'cia Project'
The inventor of the World Wide Web said on Thursday that Russian President Vladimir Putin was incorrect when he alleged the Internet was a project created by U.S...
From ACM Opinion