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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.

Toolkits For the Mind
From ACM Opinion

Toolkits For the Mind

When the Japanese computer scientist Yukihiro Matsumoto decided to create Ruby, a programming language that has helped build Twitter, Hulu, and much of the modern...

Reality Check: Comparing Hololens and Magic Leap
From ACM Opinion

Reality Check: Comparing Hololens and Magic Leap

I've seen two competing visions for a future in which virtual objects are merged seamlessly with the real world.

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...

Q&a With Futurist Martine Rothblatt
From ACM TechNews

Q&a With Futurist Martine Rothblatt

In an interview, satellite radio pioneer and futurist Martine Rothblatt says she believes there is little doubt humans will eventually invent ways to create virtual...

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?

Three Questions with the Ceo of D-Wave
From ACM Opinion

Three Questions with the Ceo of D-Wave

Vern Brownell, CEO of quantum computing startup D-Wave, says the company now has customers using its computers to tackle real problems.

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...

Microsoft's Quantum Search For the 'next Transistor'
From ACM Opinion

Microsoft's Quantum Search For the 'next Transistor'

Microsoft is making a significant investment in creating a practical version of the basic component needed to build a quantum computer, the company's head of research...
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