Communications of the ACM
From ACM Opinion
How Relying on Algorithms and Bots Can Be Really, Really Dangerous
So you can’t wait for a self-driving car to take away the drudgery of driving? Me neither! But consider this scenario, recently posed by neuroscientist Gary Marcus...
From ACM Opinion
Why All Reporters (not Just J-School Students) Should Learn to Fly Drones
These days the future of journalism may look cloudy. But one thing about the future of the business is clear, according to ABC News. It will be full of drones.
From ACM Opinion
Why It's Time For Our Devices to nderstand What We Mean, Not Just What We Say
It wasn’t just cost and Moore’s law. The graphical user interface—now known as the GUI ("gooey")—is what really made computing widespread, personal and ubiquitous...
From ACM Opinion
Homunculism
According to Wikipedia, Ray Kurzweil is an "American author, inventor, futurist, and director of engineering at Google. Aside from futurology, he is involved in...
From ACM Opinion
Computer Interfaces: Tech's Next Great Frontier
Consider the tongue. It's sensitive yet muscular, packed with taste buds and nerves, and without its acrobatic ability humans wouldn’t be able to eat or talk. It's...
From ACM Opinion
The Next Frontier Is Inside Your Brain
The Obama administration is planning a multiyear research effort to produce an "activity map" that would show in unprecedented detail the workings of the human,...
From ACM Opinion
The Brain Is Not Computable
Miguel Nicolelis, a top neuroscientist at Duke University, says computers will never replicate the human brain and that the technological Singularity is "a bunch...
From ACM Opinion
Why Mapping the Human Brain Matters
It turns out that President Barack Obama’s head-scratching mention of a project to map the human brain in his most recent State of the Union speech was more than...
From ACM Opinion
Can Machines Learn Morality?
When John Brennan, President Obama's choice to be the next head of the CIA, appeared before a Senate committee yesterday, one question supplanted all others at...
From ACM Opinion
Google's Eric Schmidt: Drone Wars, Virtual Kidnaps, and Privacy For Kids
Google's chairman has sketched out a future world in which cyberterrorists are targeted by government drone strikes, online identities are taken hostage and held...
From ACM Opinion
How to Build the Perfect Gaming Pc For 2013–and Beyond
There's little doubt that PC gaming is undergoing a renaissance at the moment.
From ACM Opinion
Talking, Walking Objects
Meeting Simon for the first time was one of the most sublime experiences I've had. With every coy head nod, casual hand wave and deep eye gaze, I felt he already...
From ACM Opinion
Ito: Think Twice About Immortality and the Singularity
Ray Kurzweil's vision of the "singularity"—when nanobots make humans immortal and computer progress is so fast that the future becomes profoundly unknowable—is...
From ACM Opinion
IBM Predicts Cognitive Systems As New Computing Wave
At year's end, IBM selects a new innovation that has the potential to change the world.
From ACM Opinion
What Makes a Mind? Kurzweil and Google May Be Surprised
After writing about Ray Kurzweil’s ambitious plan to create a super-intelligent personal assistant in his new job at Google (see "Ray Kurzweil Plans to Create a...
From ACM Opinion
Chipmaker Races to Save Stephen Hawking's Speech as His Condition Deteriorates
Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has long relied on technology to help him connect with the outside world despite the degenerative motor neuron disease he has...
From ACM Opinion
Google's Kurzweil on Teaching Human Language to Computers
Famed inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil joined Google last month to work on "some of the hardest problems in computer science," specifically machine learning and...
From ACM Opinion
What the Baseball Hall of Fame Decision Could Mean For the Singularity
If you buy into Ray Kurzweil's vision of the Singularity, then the future is a marvelous place where we’re all physically and mentally enhanced and living longer...
From ACM Opinion
The Small Business of 2063
Our world is changing faster than ever and, in recent years, a number of transformative technologies have moved from science fiction and the research and development...
From ACM Opinion