Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
How Technology Can Make Valentine's Day Much, Much Better
Every February I agonize over the Valentine's Day Dilemma. How can I show my girlfriend, whom I'll call Emily, how much I love her?
From ACM Opinion
For AI to Get Creative, It Must Learn the Rules, Then How to Break 'em
American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "Every artist was first an amateur." He likely never thought those words would apply to machines.
From ACM Opinion
I Am a Roboticist in a Cheese Factory
Most people think about robots as autonomous machines guided by artificial intelligence.
From ACM Opinion
Beyond Bitcoin: How Technology Could Help Fix Our Broken Financial System
On a spring day more than 5,000 years ago in the Mesopotamian city of Ur, a foreign merchant sold his wares in exchange for a large bundle of silver.
From ACM Opinion
Do We Need Brain Implants to Keep p with Robots?
Pundits have been fretting a lot lately about robots leaving humans behind, taking our jobs and possibly a lot more, as in The Matrix and Terminator films.
From ACM Opinion
What We Know About the Climate Change-Hurricane Connection
With Texas just beginning to recover from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Harvey and the Southeastern U.S. preparing for Hurricane Irma's iminent arrival, people...
From ACM Opinion
Magical Technologies Just Over the Horizon
We the people have always been helplessly drawn to the concept of magic: the notion that you can will something to happen by wiggling your nose, speaking special...
From ACM Opinion
Preserving the Right to Cognitive Liberty
The idea of the human mind as the domain of absolute protection from external intrusion has persisted for centuries.
From ACM Opinion
Is Anyone Home? A Way to Find Out If AI Has Become Self-Aware
Every moment of your waking life and whenever you dream, you have the distinct inner feeling of being "you."
From ACM Opinion
Why Robots Must Learn to Tell S 'no'
HAL 9000, the sentient computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, offers an ominous glimpse of a future in which machines endowed with artificial intelligence reject human...
From ACM Opinion
E-Voting Refuses to Die Even Though It's Neither Secure Nor Secret
In theory, using the internet or e-mail to vote for the U.S. president sounds like a good idea.
From ACM Opinion
Grading the Presidential Candidates on Science
Two weeks ago, Scientific American asked for your help in grading the presidential candidates on their answers to 20 questions about various aspects of scientific...
From ACM Opinion
Americans Are Wary About Body-Enhancement Technologies
Emerging technologies that draw from biomedical technology, nanotechnology, information technology and other fields are developing at a rapid pace and may lead...
From ACM Opinion
Rise of the Ag-Bots Will Not Sow Seeds of nemployment
Larry Stap's fifth-generation family dairy farm has come a long way since his great grandfather established it in Lynden, Wash., in 1910.
From ACM Opinion
How the Computer Beat the Go Player
The victory in March of the computer program AlphaGo over one of the world's top handful of go players marks the highest accomplishment to date for the burgeoning...
From ACM Opinion
Can Starshot Work?
A couple of weeks ago the world heard about the most seriously funded (and perhaps the most serious) effort yet for starting us on the pathway to interstellar travel...
From ACM Opinion
Who's Responsible When a Self-Driving Car Crashes?
Valentine's Day was a bummer in Mountain View, Calif. For the first time, one of Google's self-driving cars, a modified Lexus SUV, caused a crash.
From ACM Opinion
Why We Love the Games That Enrage S Most
One afternoon last fall a Reddit user with the handle "FranktheShank1" was enjoying a new video game on his PlayStation 4.
From ACM Opinion
The Embarrassing, Destructive Fight Over Biotech's Big Breakthrough
A defining moment in modern biology occurred on July 24, 1978, when biotechnology pioneer Robert Swanson, who had recently co-founded Genentech, brought two young...
From ACM Opinion