Communications of the ACM
Hackers Used to Be Humans. Soon, AIs Will Hack Humanity
To date, hacking has exclusively been a human activity. Not for long.
From ACM Opinion
5 Star Trek Technologies That Are More Truth Than Science Fiction
It's easy to get sucked in by the wild and wacky science of Star Trek, from beaming and materializing in other places, to the intense blast of deadly light from...
From ACM Opinion
Google's 'quantum Supremacy' Moment May Not Mean What You Think
Any day now, Google is expected to achieve quantum supremacy—the use of a quantum computer to solve a problem that even the most advanced supercomputer can't unravel...
From ACM Opinion
Fiction That Gets AI Right
Even the most futuristic applications of AI, from robotic servants to instant health scans, somehow already seem familiar because they have been endless fodder...
From ACM Opinion
There's No Good Decision in the Next Big Data Privacy Case
In 2013, United States agents served a warrant on Microsoft seeking the emails of a suspect in a drug case.
From ACM Opinion
Driverless Cars Made Me Nervous. Then I Tried One.
On my fourth day in a semi-driverless car, I finally felt comfortable enough to let it stop itself.
From ACM Opinion
Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges--The Aliens Are All Asleep
Anders Sandberg and Stuart Armstrong of the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, working with Milan Ćirković of the University of Novi Sad in Serbia...
From ACM Opinion
The Supreme Court Is Allergic to Math
The Supreme Court does not compute. Or at least some of its members would rather not. The justices, the most powerful jurists in the land, seem to have a reluctance—even...
From ACM Opinion
Smartphones Are Weapons of Mass Manipulation, and This Guy Is Declaring War on Them
If, like an ever-growing majority of people in the U.S., you own a smartphone, you might have the sense that apps in the age of the pocket-sized computer are designed...
From ACM Opinion
Will AI and Blockchain Be Game-Changers?
This week saw another major achievement by Google's Deep Mind, when it showed that a neural network could learn to play Go in just three days, without even looking...
From ACM Opinion
Andrew Ng Has a Chatbot That Can Help with Depression
I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, but I've been seeing a virtual therapist.
From ACM Opinion
Oculus Chief Scientist Speaks About Virtual Reality in the Lab and on Your Face
While many of us are impatient with virtual reality—the best headsets are still too expensive, they need to be tethered to beefy computers, and there isn't all...
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Dna Sequencing
Forty years ago, two papers1, 2 described the first tractable methods for determining the order of the chemical bases in stretches of DNA. Before these 1977 publications...
From ACM Opinion
The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions
We are surrounded by hysteria about the future of artificial intelligence and robotics—hysteria about how powerful they will become, how quickly, and what they...
From ACM Opinion
Apple's Tim Cook on Iphones, Augmented Reality, and How He Plans to Change Your World
Earlier this year, video emerged of a new iPhone feature, long before it was released. It showed the phone creating a magical portal in the middle of a city street...
From ACM Opinion
The Scientist Who Spots Fake Videos
Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, specialises in detecting manipulated images and videos. Farid, who provides his...
From ACM Opinion
China's AI Awakening
On a tropical island that marks the southern tip of China, a computer program called Lengpudashi is playing one-on-one poker against a dozen people at once, and...
From ACM Opinion
Why Is There No Nobel Prize in Technology?
As the world focuses its attention on this year's recipients of the planet's most prestigious prize, the Nobel, it feels like something's missing from the list:...
From ACM Opinion
Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue
For more than two decades, Tim O'Reilly has been the conscience of the tech industry.
From ACM Opinion
How the Chinese Cyberthreat Has evolved
With more than half of its 1.4 billion people online, the world's most populous country is home to a slew of cyberspies and hackers.
From ACM Opinion