acm-header
Sign In

Communications of the ACM

Recent Opinion


Articles Interviews Vardi's Insights Chien's Vantage Opinion Archive Refine your search:
dateMore Than a Year Ago
subjectComputers And Society
authorTechnology Review
bg-corner

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...

What Are Moocs Good For?
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...

Isaac Asimov Mulls 'how Do People Get New Ideas?'
From ACM Opinion

Isaac Asimov Mulls 'how Do People Get New Ideas?'

In 1959, I worked as a scientist at Allied Research Associates in Boston.

What It Will Take For Computers to Be Conscious
From ACM Opinion

What It Will Take For Computers to Be Conscious

Is a worm conscious? How about a bumblebee? Does a computer that can play chess "feel" anything?

Technology Stalled in 1970
From ACM Opinion

Technology Stalled in 1970

Peter Thiel has been behind some prominent technologies: he cofounded PayPal and was an early investor in such companies as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tesla Motors...

The History Inside ­S
From ACM Opinion

The History Inside ­S

Every day our DNA breaks a little. Special enzymes keep our genome intact while we're alive, but after death, once the oxygen runs out, there is no more repair.

In Praise of Efficient Price Gouging
From ACM Opinion

In Praise of Efficient Price Gouging

In the four years since the car service Uber launched, it has been beset by criticism from myriad groups, including city officials annoyed by its sometimes cavalier...

Former Nsa Deputy Director John C. Inglis
From ACM Opinion

Former Nsa Deputy Director John C. Inglis

More than a year after ex-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden began leaking details of the agency's electronic surveillance programs, questions remain...

Three Questions For J. Craig Venter
From ACM Opinion

Three Questions For J. Craig Venter

Genome scientist and entrepreneur J. Craig Venter is best known for being the first person to sequence his own genome, back in 2001.

Three Questions For Robotics Inventor Cynthia Breazeal About Social Robots
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...

Ray Kurzweil Says He's Breathing Intelligence Into Google Search
From ACM Opinion

Ray Kurzweil Says He's Breathing Intelligence Into Google Search

The big announcements at Google's I/O event in San Francisco Wednesday didn't mention Web search, the technology that got the company started and made it so successful...

Joseph Ledoux
From ACM Opinion

Joseph Ledoux

When it comes to the study of memory, we might be living in something of a golden age.

Three Questions with Amazon's Technology Chief, Werner Vogels
From ACM Opinion

Three Questions with Amazon's Technology Chief, Werner Vogels

In the eight years since Amazon.com rolled out its cloud-computing business, Amazon Web Services, this has grown from a side project that took advantage of the...

Imposing Security
From ACM Opinion

Imposing Security

Three computer bugs this year exposed passwords, e-mails, financial data, and other kinds of sensitive information connected to potentially billions of people.

How the ­.s. Could Escalate Its Name-and-Shame Campaign Against China's Espionage
From ACM Opinion

How the ­.s. Could Escalate Its Name-and-Shame Campaign Against China's Espionage

Earlier this week the U.S. Department of Justice indicted five Chinese military officers for industrial espionage, accusing them of leading attacks on the computers...

Three Questions with the Man Leading Baidu's New AI Effort
From ACM Opinion

Three Questions with the Man Leading Baidu's New AI Effort

Artificial intelligence is guided by the far-off goal of having software match humans at important tasks.

Do We Need Asimov's Laws?
From ACM News

Do We Need Asimov's Laws?

In 1942, the science fiction author Isaac Asimov published a short story called Runaround in which he introduced three laws that governed the behaviour of robots...
Sign In for Full Access
» Forgot Password? » Create an ACM Web Account