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dateMore Than a Year Ago
subjectComputers And Society
authorTechnology Review
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How an Inventor You've Probably Never Heard of Shaped the Modern World
From ACM Opinion

How an Inventor You've Probably Never Heard of Shaped the Modern World

Many of the inventors who fueled the digital revolution have become household names.

Why Russian Hackers Probably Can't Mess with the ­.s. Election
From ACM Opinion

Why Russian Hackers Probably Can't Mess with the ­.s. Election

State-sponsored Russian hackers appear to be behind attacks on voter databases in Arizona and Illinois.

How to Read Between the Lines of Tim Cook's Epic Interview
From ACM Opinion

How to Read Between the Lines of Tim Cook's Epic Interview

To celebrate five years as CEO of Apple, Tim Cook has given a very long, exclusive interview to the Washington Post about his experiences so far. But what he didn’t...

Basic Income: A Sellout of the American Dream
From ACM Opinion

Basic Income: A Sellout of the American Dream

Matt Krisiloff is in a small, glass-walled conference room off the lobby of Y Combinator’s office in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood, shouting distance...

The All-American Iphone
From ACM Opinion

The All-American Iphone

Donald Trump says that if he becomes president, he will "get Apple to start making their computers and their iPhones on our land, not in China." Bernie ­Sanders...

Why Seti Researchers Must Change the Way They Announce First Contact
From ACM Opinion

Why Seti Researchers Must Change the Way They Announce First Contact

One of humanity’s most significant events will be the discovery of intelligent life elsewhere in universe. Back in the 1980s, a group of astronomers involved in...

What If Apple Is Wrong?
From ACM Opinion

What If Apple Is Wrong?

Soon after Devon Godfrey was shot to death in his apartment in Harlem on the evening of April 12, 2010, officers with the New York Police Department thought they...

Head of British Intelligence Agency on Apple, Snowden, and Regrets
From ACM Opinion

Head of British Intelligence Agency on Apple, Snowden, and Regrets

Shortly after Robert Hannigan took over the British signals-intelligence agency GCHQ in 2014, he implored technology companies to do more to facilitate investigations...

How Apple Could Fed-Proof Its Software ­pdate System
From ACM Opinion

How Apple Could Fed-Proof Its Software ­pdate System

Apple's refusal to comply with a judge's demand that it help the FBI unlock a terrorist's iPhone has triggered a roiling debate about how much the U.S. government...

Apple's 'code = Speech' Mistake
From ACM Opinion

Apple's 'code = Speech' Mistake

In its legal fight against the FBI over iPhone security, Apple has made just about every argument it can credibly make.

Will Machines Eliminate ­s?
From ACM Opinion

Will Machines Eliminate ­s?

Yoshua Bengio leads one of the world's preëminent research groups developing a powerful AI technique known as deep learning.

Fighting Isis Online
From ACM Opinion

Fighting Isis Online

The two men pecked out messages on opposite sides of the country.

The False Science of Cryonics
From ACM Opinion

The False Science of Cryonics

I woke up on Saturday to a heartbreaking front-page article in the New York Times about a terminally ill young woman who chooses to freeze her brain.

Who Will Own the Robots?
From ACM News

Who Will Own the Robots?

The way Hod Lipson describes his Creative Machines Lab captures his ambitions: "We are interested in robots that create and are creative."  

Why Robots and Humans Struggled with Darpa's Challenge
From ACM Opinion

Why Robots and Humans Struggled with Darpa's Challenge

When some of the world's most advanced rescue robots are foiled by nothing more complex than a doorknob, you get a good sense of the challenge of making our homes...

3 Questions on Killer Robots
From ACM Opinion

3 Questions on Killer Robots

Delegates to the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons are meeting this week in Geneva to discuss fully autonomous weapons—machines that could...

Putting Technology in Its Place
From ACM Opinion

Putting Technology in Its Place

Kentaro Toyama calls himself "a recovering technoholic"—someone who once was "addicted to a technological way of solving problems."

AI Doomsayer Says His Ideas Are Catching On
From ACM Opinion

AI Doomsayer Says His Ideas Are Catching On

Philosopher Nick Bostrom says major tech companies are listening to his warnings about artificial intelligence.

Our Fear of Artificial Intelligence
From ACM Opinion

Our Fear of Artificial Intelligence

Years ago I had coffee with a friend who ran a startup.

2014 in Computing: Breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence
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...
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