Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
The Illusion of Time
According to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: our naive perception of its flow doesn't correspond to physical reality.
From ACM Opinion
Regulate Artificial Intelligence to Avert Cyber Arms Race
Cyberattacks are becoming more frequent, sophisticated and destructive. Each day in 2017, the United States suffered, on average, more than 4,000 ransomware attacks...
From ACM Opinion
The Ageless Appeal of 2001: A Space Odyssey
In 1968, film-maker Stanley Kubrick and his screenwriting colleague, science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, presented 2001: A Space Odyssey. Half a century later...
From ACM Opinion
Cambridge Analytica Controversy Must Spur Researchers to Update Data Ethics
Revelations keep emerging in the Cambridge Analytica personal-data scandal, which has captured global public attention for more than a week. But when the dust settles...
From ACM Opinion
Does Your Code Stand p to Scrutiny?
Computer code written by scientists forms the basis of an increasing number of studies across many fields—and an increasing number of papers that report the results...
From ACM Opinion
Technology to Watch in 2018
For all the excitement surrounding the gene-editing tool CRISPR, it is not that efficient or precise. It's hard to make many changes at once.
From ACM Opinion
Exoplanet Science 2.0
It is more than two decades since we learnt that the Universe is awash with other worlds. Since 1992, more than 3,500 exoplanets have been discovered orbiting stars...
From ACM Opinion
Five Priorities For Weather and Climate Research
Meteorology is entering a new era. Demand is growing worldwide for forecasts of storms, floods and droughts.
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Dna Sequencing
Forty years ago, two papers1, 2 described the first tractable methods for determining the order of the chemical bases in stretches of DNA. Before these 1977 publications...
From ACM Opinion
Artificial Intelligence: The Future Is Superintelligent
Max Tegmark is a renowned physicist. He is also the irrepressibly optimistic co-founder of the Future of Life Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts (motto: "Technology...
From ACM Opinion
Metrology Is Key to Reproducing Results
Imagine you are a policymaker who needs to know how much carbon is stored in the South American forest.
From ACM Opinion
Quantum Teleportation Is Even Weirder Than You Think
A BBC headline last week, 'First object teleported to Earth's orbit', has to be one of the most fantastical you'll see this year. For once, it seems the future...
From ACM Opinion
Information Technology: A Digital Genius at Play
The US mathematician and electrical engineer Claude Shannon, whose life spanned the tumultuous, technologically explosive twentieth century, is often called the...
From ACM Opinion
Image Doctoring Must Be Halted
Seven years ago, a cover of The Economist showed Barack Obama, head down on a Louisiana beach in front of an oil rig—the picture of lonely despair.
From ACM Opinion
Medical Microbots Need Better Imaging and Control
More than 50 years ago, physicist Richard Feynman spoke of "swallowing the surgeon" in his classic lecture, 'There's plenty of room at the bottom'.
From ACM Opinion
Artificial Intelligence: Chess Match of the Century
Nearly 20 years ago, I was fortunate enough to play friendly blitz chess against former world champion Garry Kasparov.
From ACM Opinion
Five Hacks For Digital Democracy
The election of a politically inexperienced president in the United States, Britain's vote to leave the European Union and the initial rejection of a peace deal...
From ACM Opinion
Track How Technology Is Transforming Work
Advances in technology pose huge challenges for jobs. Productivity levels have never been higher in the United States, for example, but income for the bottom 50...
From ACM Opinion
Quantum Computers Ready to Leap Out of the Lab in 2017
Quantum computing has long seemed like one of those technologies that are 20 years away, and always will be.
From ACM Opinion