Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
Bot and Bothered
Facebook has been working on artificial intelligence that claims to be great at negotiating, makes up its own language and learns to lie.
From ACM Opinion
Why President Obama Won't Pardon Edward Snowden
On September 14, 2016, days before the premiere of Oliver Stone's hagiographic movieSnowden, Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty...
From ACM Opinion
Why Facebook Can't Fix Fake News
Imagine going on Facebook and finding no political posts—just your friends and their updates.
From ACM Opinion
Neither Hillary Clinton Nor Donald Trump Is Tech Savvy
Rachel Law, the 20-something co-founder of a New York startup called Kip, is sitting next to me at a café, tapping her phone screen to show how the company’s service...
From ACM Opinion
How Tim Cook Aims to Profit from Protecting Privacy
Would you stop buying Apple's products if it decided to help the FBI open a terrorist's iPhone?
From ACM Opinion
Why the Black Box on Airplanes Needs to Go Away
In another 10 years, the very idea of a "black box" flight data recorder on an airliner will seem as naive and outdated as a smoking section.
From ACM Opinion
Hacking Your Dna
Keeping track of what we reveal about ourselves each day—through email and text messages, Amazon purchases and Facebook "likes"—is hard enough.
From ACM Opinion
An Easy Way to Improve the Olympics: Make Performance Enhancements Legal
In February 2013, Lindsey Vonn—perhaps the most accomplished female skier in American history—tore her anterior cruciate ligament in a crash in the mountains of...
From ACM Opinion
Last Call For Bad Calls
Technology will soon make officials at high-level sports events as obsolete as elevator operators, their skill set as useful as knowing how to make a wood tennis...
From ACM Opinion
The Predictive Power of Big Data
Right now, the average person's data footprint—the annual amount of data produced worldwide, per capita—is just a little short of one terabyte.
From ACM Opinion
Sorry, It's Not 1984
After leaker Edward Snowden revealed the existence of massive domestic-surveillance programs operated by the NSA, the airwaves were clotted with pundits and politicians...
From ACM News
Who Needs Humans?
Amid all the job losses of the Great Recession, there is one category of worker that the economic disruption has been good for: nonhumans.
From ACM Opinion
Don't Track Me, Bro
Here is how Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, describes the current state of affairs on the Internet: "Say I’m walking through a mall...
From ACM Opinion
Friends Without Benefits
The Valley used to be a place run by scientists and engineers, people like Robert Noyce, the Ph.D. physicist who helped invent the integrated circuit and cofounded...
From ACM Opinion
Is Wikileaks Too Full of Itself?
Have the activists behind WikiLeaks—and in particular the Web site's founder, Julian Assange—become intoxicated by their own myth? Two recent events involving...
From ACM Opinion