Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
Untold History of AI: The DARPA Dreamer Who Aimed for Cyborg Intelligence
At 10:30pm on 29 October 1969, a graduate student at UCLA sent a two-letter message from an SDS Sigma 7 computer to another machine a few hundred miles away at...
From ACM Opinion
This Tech Would Have Spotted the Secret Chinese Chip in Seconds
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, spies in China managed to insert chips into computer systems that would allow external control of those systems.
From ACM Opinion
Forging Voices and Faces: The Dangers of Audio and Video Fabrication
In 1963, before he could give the speech he'd prepared for his trip to Dallas, U.S. president John F. Kennedy was assassinated. In March 2018, a company re-created...
From ACM Opinion
To Illustrate the Dangers of Cyberwarfare, the Army Is Turning to Sci-Fi
At first glance, Dark Hammer looks a lot like any other science fiction comic book: On the front cover, a drone flies over a river dividing a city with damaged...
From ACM Opinion
Q&a: The Ethics of sing Brain Implants to pgrade Yourself
Neurotechnology is one of the hottest areas of engineering, and the technological achievements sound miraculous: Paralyzed people have controlled robotic limbs and ...
From ACM Opinion
Behold, the World's Most Famous teapot
Martin Newell was worried about his Ph.D. research as he sat down to tea with his wife one day in 1974.
From ACM Opinion
Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges--The Aliens Are All Asleep
Anders Sandberg and Stuart Armstrong of the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, working with Milan Ćirković of the University of Novi Sad in Serbia...
From ACM Opinion
How We Won Gold in the Cyborg Olympics' Brain Race
In October 2016, inside a sold-out arena in Zurich, a man named Numa Poujouly steered his wheelchair up to the central podium.
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Computing Depends on Making It Reversible
For more than 50 years, computers have made steady and dramatic improvements, all thanks to Moore's Law—the exponential increase over time in the number of transistors...
From ACM Opinion
Beyond Touch: Tomorrow's Devices Will se Mems ltrasound to Hear Your Gestures
Today, we control our electronic world by touch—we tap, we swipe, we pinch and zoom.
From ACM Opinion
The Security Challenges of Online Voting Have Not Gone Away
Online voting is sometimes heralded as a solution to all our election headaches.
From ACM Opinion
A Radical Proposal: Replace Hard Disks with Dram
When it comes to computer storage, the magnetic disk has been top dog for almost half a century.
From ACM Opinion
Openbci: Control An Air Shark With Your Mind
Le's be clear: This is a parlor trick, not neuroscience. Nonetheless, with the help of some friends, I was able to make a toy shark fly through the air using brain...
From ACM Opinion
The STEM Crisis Is a Myth
You must have seen the warning a thousand times: Too few young people study scientific or technical subjects, businesses can't find enough workers in those fields...
From ACM Opinion
Why Teaching a Robot to Fetch a Cup of Coffee Matters
In robotics, as in life, it often takes small steps to reach a big goal.
From ACM Opinion
Steve Mann: My 'augmediated' Life
Back in 2004, I was awakened early one morning by a loud clatter. I ran outside, only to discover that a car had smashed into the corner of my house.
From ACM Opinion
It's Time to Start 3d Scanning the World
When Microsoft was developing its Kinect 3D sensor, a critical task was to calibrate its algorithms to rapidly and accurately recognize parts of the human body,...
From ACM News