Communications of the ACM
From ACM Opinion
A Second 737 Max Crash Raises Questions about Airplane Automation
As you read this, over a million people are in flight. Close to a third of the commercial airplanes in the sky at any given moment are Boeing 737s: it is the best...
From ACM Opinion
This Is Why AI Has Yet to Reshape Most Businesses
The art of making perfumes and colognes hasn't changed much since the 1880s, when synthetic ingredients began to be used.
From ACM Opinion
Five Emerging Cyber-Threats to Worry About in 2019
Last year was full of cybersecurity disasters, from the revelation of security flaws in billions of microchips to massive data breaches and attacks using malicious...
From ACM Opinion
When Chinese Hackers Declared War on the Rest of Us
Late one Wednesday in March 2015, an alarm sounded in the offices of GitHub, a San Francisco-based software firm. The company's offices exemplified the kind of...
From ACM Opinion
Never Mind Killer Robots; Here Are Six Real AI Dangers to Watch Out for in 2019
Once it was fashionable to fret about the prospect of super-intelligent machines taking over the world. The past year showed that AI may cause all sorts of hazards...
From ACM Opinion
China vs. the US: Who Wins and Who Loses
Born in Beijing and educated at Harvard, Yasheng Huang, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, is a keen observer of China's entrepreneurial efforts and...
From ACM Opinion
How China Got a Head Start in Fintech, and Why the West Won't Catch Up
In 2013 I moved from Paris to Beijing to study China's financial system. I stayed for two years and became fluent enough to translate economics books from Mandarin...
From ACM Opinion
The Man Turning China Into a Quantum Superpower
On September 29, 2017, a Chinese satellite known as Micius made possible an unhackable videoconference between Vienna and Beijing, two cities half a world apart...
From ACM Opinion
One of the Fathers of AI Is Worried About Its Future
Yoshua Bengio is a grand master of modern artificial intelligence.
From ACM Opinion
AI Is Not 'Magic Dust' for Your Company, Says Google’s Cloud AI Boss
Andrew Moore is the new head of Google's Cloud AI business, a unit that is striving to make machine-learning tools and techniques more accessible and useful for...
From ACM Opinion
Why Alibaba Is Betting Big on AI Chips and Quantum Computing
During the opening ceremony of Alibaba's 2018 computing conference last week, Simon Hu, president of Alibaba Cloud, invited the MC to taste some tea on the stage—but...
From ACM Opinion
For Safety's Sake, We Must Slow Innovation in Internet-Connected Things
Smart gadgets are everywhere.
From ACM Opinion
Fake America Great Again
Guess what? I just got hold of some embarrassing video footage of Texas senator Ted Cruz singing and gyrating to Tina Turner. His political enemies will have great...
From ACM Opinion
The Four Ways that Ex-Internet Idealists Explain Where It All Went Wrong
A long time ago, in the bad old days of the 2000s, debates about the Internet were dominated by two great tribes: the Optimists and the Pessimists.
From ACM Opinion
Future Elections May Be Swayed by Intelligent, Weaponized Chatbots
The battle against propaganda bots is an arm's race for our democracy. It's one we may be about to lose.
From ACM Opinion
Who Needs Democracy When You Have Data?
In 1955, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published a short story about an experiment in "electronic democracy," in which a single citizen, selected to represent...
From ACM Opinion
Hackers Are Out to Jeopardize Your Vote
Russian hackers targeted US electoral systems during the 2016 presidential election.
From ACM Opinion
Why AI Researchers Shouldn't Turn Their Backs on the Military
More than 2,400 AI researchers recently signed a pledge promising not to build so-called autonomous weapons—systems that would decide on their own whom to kill....
From ACM Opinion
AI for Cybersecurity Is a Hot New Thing, and a Dangerous Gamble
When I walked around the exhibition floor at this week's massive Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, I was struck by the number of companies boasting...12