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dateMore Than a Year Ago
subjectInformation Systems
authorTechnology Review
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Can This Man Make AI More Human?
From ACM Opinion

Can This Man Make AI More Human?

Like any proud father, Gary Marcus is only too happy to talk about the latest achievements of his two-year-old son.

Fighting Isis Online
From ACM Opinion

Fighting Isis Online

The two men pecked out messages on opposite sides of the country.

Facebook's Cyborg Virtual Assistant Is Learning from Its Trainers
From ACM Opinion

Facebook's Cyborg Virtual Assistant Is Learning from Its Trainers

Late last month a few hundred lucky users of Facebook's mobile messaging app got an unusual new contact to talk with: M, a virtual assistant powered by a mixture...

The False Science of Cryonics
From ACM Opinion

The False Science of Cryonics

I woke up on Saturday to a heartbreaking front-page article in the New York Times about a terminally ill young woman who chooses to freeze her brain.

Who Will Own the Robots?
From ACM News

Who Will Own the Robots?

The way Hod Lipson describes his Creative Machines Lab captures his ambitions: "We are interested in robots that create and are creative."  

Why Robots and Humans Struggled with Darpa's Challenge
From ACM Opinion

Why Robots and Humans Struggled with Darpa's Challenge

When some of the world's most advanced rescue robots are foiled by nothing more complex than a doorknob, you get a good sense of the challenge of making our homes...

3 Questions on Killer Robots
From ACM Opinion

3 Questions on Killer Robots

Delegates to the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons are meeting this week in Geneva to discuss fully autonomous weapons—machines that could...

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."

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...

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?

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...
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