Communications of the ACM
Breaking Up a Digital Monopoly
How to decompose a vertically integrated digital monopoly to enable competitive services based on a shared data structure.
From ACM Opinion
Stop Saying Driverless Cars Will Help Old People
And maybe start including them in research instead of just assuming we know what they want.
From ACM Opinion
VR Could Be the Most Powerful Teaching Tool Since the PC
Virtual reality is much more than a gaming technology. In fact, VR has the makings of a pedagogical silver bullet.
From ACM Opinion
Shoot-'Em-Up Videogames Don't Warp Minds – Big Tech Does
It takes a lot of effort, research, and efficiency to manipulate people online and influence their behavior in the real world. Silicon Valley has it down to a science...
From ACM Opinion
The Robocall Crisis Will Never Be Totally Fixed
Years into the robocalling frenzy, your phone probably still rings off the hook with "important information about your account," updates from the "Chinese embassy...
From ACM Opinion
China Will Likely Corner the 5G Market, and the S Has No Plan
You may have heard that China has cornered much of the world's supply of strategic metals and minerals crucial for new technology, including lithium, rare earths...
From ACM Opinion
Trump's Plan to Keep America First in AI
The US leads the world in artificial intelligence technology. Decades of federal research funding, industrial and academic research, and streams of foreign talent...
From ACM Opinion
There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology
In his 2008 white paper that first proposed bitcoin, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto concluded with: "We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without...
From ACM Opinion
Tor Is Easier Than Ever. Time to Give It a Try
You probably know about the digital anonymity service Tor, but for whatever reason you may not actually use it.
From ACM Opinion
Don't Fear the Robot Overlords; Embrace Them as Coworkers
In a chilly warehouse just outside of Boston, the brute toils away. It's 600 pounds of orange and black metal and whirring motors, a massive robotic arm that picks...
From ACM Opinion
You Know What? Go Ahead and se the Hotel Wi-Fi
As you travel this holiday season, bouncing from airport to airplane to hotel, you'll likely find yourself facing a familiar quandary: Do I really trust this ...
From ACM Opinion
Surveillance Kills Freedom By Killing Experimentation
In my book Data and Goliath, I write about the value of privacy. I talk about how it is essential for political liberty and justice, and for commercial fairness...
From ACM Opinion
Paper and the Case for Going Low-Tech in the Voting Booth
In September 2017, barely two months before Virginians went to the polls to pick a new governor, the state's board of elections convened an emergency session. The...
From ACM Opinion
You're Expecting Too Much Out of Boston Dynamics' Robots
At the WIRED25 festival in San Francisco Sunday evening, Boston Dynamics' SpotMini robot got onstage and did what no other quadruped robot has done before: It danced...
From ACM Opinion
How Bots Ruined Clicktivism
I recently came across two tweets—or rather, thousands of tweets sharing the same two ideas over and over again.
From ACM Opinion
Google Tracks You Even If Location History's Off. Here's How to Stop It
If, like most people, you thought Google stopped tracking your location once you turned off Location History in your account settings, you were wrong.
From ACM Opinion
Why Westerners Fear Robots and the Japanese Do Not
As a Japanese, I grew up watching anime like "Neon Genesis Evangelion," which depicts a future in which machines and humans merge into cyborg ecstasy.
From ACM Opinion
How Plausible Are All Those Mission: Impossible Gadgets, Anyway?
It's been 22 years since Tom Cruise infiltrated a CIA vault suspended from a wire in the first Mission: Impossible flick.
From ACM Opinion
A Landmark Legal Shift Opens Pandora's Box for DIY Guns
Five years ago, 25-year-old radical libertarian Cody Wilson stood on a remote central Texas gun range and pulled the trigger on the world's first fully 3-D-printed...
From ACM Opinion
A Plea for AI That Serves Humanity Instead of Replacing It
Sixty-two years ago this summer, Dartmouth professor John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence. Joi Ito, director of MIT's Media Lab, has come to think...
From ACM Opinion