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dateMore Than a Year Ago
subjectPerformance And Reliability
authorThe New Yorker
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Automated Health Care Offers Freedom from Shame, But Is It What Patients Need?
From ACM Opinion

Automated Health Care Offers Freedom from Shame, But Is It What Patients Need?

A few years ago, Timothy Bickmore, a computer scientist at Northeastern University, developed an artificial-intelligence program to help low-income patients at...

How Frightened Should We Be of A.I.?
From ACM Opinion

How Frightened Should We Be of A.I.?

Precisely how and when will our curiosity kill us?

'2001: A Space Odyssey': What It Means, and How It Was Made
From ACM Opinion

'2001: A Space Odyssey': What It Means, and How It Was Made

Fifty years ago this spring, Stanley Kubrick's confounding sci-fi masterpiece, "2001: A Space Odyssey," had its premières across the country.

We May Own Our Data, But Facebook Has a Duty to Protect It
From ACM Opinion

We May Own Our Data, But Facebook Has a Duty to Protect It

Two years ago, Jack M. Balkin, a constitutional-law professor at Yale, published a fifty-page article in the U.C. Davis Law Review examining what he called problems...

Cryptocurrency: The Hail Mary Pass for People Who Missed the Tech Boom
From ACM Opinion

Cryptocurrency: The Hail Mary Pass for People Who Missed the Tech Boom

Between mid-December and early February, bitcoin lost more than half its value, dropping from a high of nearly twenty thousand dollars to just below seven thousand...

New York City's Bold, Flawed Attempt to Make Algorithms Accountable
From ACM Opinion

New York City's Bold, Flawed Attempt to Make Algorithms Accountable

The end of a politician's time in office often inspires a turn toward the existential, but few causes are as quixotic as the one chosen by James Vacca, who this...

Remembering Lotfi Zadeh, the Inventor of Fuzzy Logic
From ACM Careers

Remembering Lotfi Zadeh, the Inventor of Fuzzy Logic

One night in July, 1964, the logician Lotfi Zadeh found himself alone in his parents' New York apartment, his dinner plans cancelled.

The Fake-News Fallacy
From ACM Opinion

The Fake-News Fallacy

On the evening of October 30, 1938, a seventy-six-year-old millworker in Grover's Mill, New Jersey, named Bill Dock heard something terrifying on the radio.

How the Voyager Golden Record Was Made
From ACM Opinion

How the Voyager Golden Record Was Made

We inhabit a small planet orbiting a medium-sized star about two-thirds of the way out from the center of the Milky Way galaxy—around where Track 2 on an LP record...

What If We Had Perfect Robot Referees
From ACM Opinion

What If We Had Perfect Robot Referees

Last month, Mark Clattenburg, who is generally regarded as one of the finest referees in professional soccer, left England's Premier League for a better-paying...

Reality Bites: Learning the Future of V.r. at Sundance
From ACM Opinion

Reality Bites: Learning the Future of V.r. at Sundance

Standing in a pink desert landscape, I looked down and realized I'd become a robot, with skinny metal legs and pincers for hands.

The Hype, and Hope, of Artificial Intelligence
From ACM Opinion

The Hype, and Hope, of Artificial Intelligence

Earlier this month, on his HBO show "Last Week Tonight," John Oliver skewered media companies' desperate search for clicks.

All Alone in No Man's Sky
From ACM Opinion

All Alone in No Man's Sky

If reality is a game—a vast, snow-globe-y sort of experiment that plays out according to the hard rules of physics and the loose rules of story—then it is, in contemporary...

Could Brain Training Prevent Dementia?
From ACM Opinion

Could Brain Training Prevent Dementia?

It's been a lousy couple of years for researchers who study the effects of computerized brain training.

Pokémon Go Will Make You Crave Augmented Reality
From ACM Opinion

Pokémon Go Will Make You Crave Augmented Reality

It started as an April Fool's joke.

Waiting For Gödel
From ACM Opinion

Waiting For Gödel

In June of 1975, the Office of the White House Press Secretary announced President Gerald R. Ford’s picks for the National Medal of Science. One went to the Austrian...

For the Golden State Warriors, Brain-Zapping Could Provide an Edge
From ACM Opinion

For the Golden State Warriors, Brain-Zapping Could Provide an Edge

Back in March, James Michael McAdoo, the power forward for the Golden State Warriors, tweeted out a photo of himself in the training room, sporting a pair of slick...

What Are the Odds We Are Living in a Computer Simulation?
From ACM Opinion

What Are the Odds We Are Living in a Computer Simulation?

Last week, Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and other cutting-edge companies, took a surprising question at the Code Conference, a technology...

What Would Happen If G.p.s. Failed?
From ACM Opinion

What Would Happen If G.p.s. Failed?

The radio signal that is the lifeblood of the Global Positioning System originates from a constellation of twenty-four satellites, orbiting more than twelve thousand...

Will Smell Ever Come to Smartphones?
From ACM Opinion

Will Smell Ever Come to Smartphones?

Two years ago, at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, I witnessed David Edwards receive what he claimed was the world's first transatlantic ...
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