Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
Don't Regulate Artificial Intelligence: Starve It
The potential dangers of artificial intelligence are great enough to required great care about how powerful we allow it to become.
From ACM Opinion
STEM Education Needs a Course Correction
Technical training today should not be solely in the business of making better coders but of making better people who will be able to cultivate the future.
From ACM Opinion
Our Disabilities Have Made s Better Scientists
Scientific research is rarely designed to accommodate scientists with medical conditions or disabilities.
From ACM Opinion
Where Are All the Working Mothers in STEM?
Parenthood is a key driver of gender imbalance in STEM. Almost half of all women in full-time science jobs leave or go part-time after the birth of their first...
From ACM Opinion
The Facebook Controversy: Privacy Is Not the Issue
Cambridge Analytica's wholesale scraping of Facebook user data is familiar news by now, and we are all "shocked" that personal data are being shared and traded...
From ACM Opinion
Fateful Phone Call Spawned Moore's Law
In their new book, Moore's Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley's Quiet Revolutionary, authors Arnold Thackray, David C. Brock and Rachel Jones chronicle...
From ACM Opinion
Why We're All Beta Testers Now
I taught a class a few years ago at Columbia Business School called "What Makes a Hit a Hit—and a Flop a Flop."
From ACM Opinion
When Big Data Marketing Becomes Stalking
Many of us now expect our online activities to be recorded and analyzed, but we assume that the physical spaces we inhabit are different.
From ACM Opinion
'net Neutrality' Ruling Opens Door For Two-Tiered Internet Market
An "Open Internet" became endangered this week at a time when the U.S. increasingly relies on Internet services to deliver everything from education to entertainment...
From ACM Opinion
23andme Is Terrifying, But Not For the Reasons the Fda Thinks
If there's a gene for hubris, the 23andMe crew has certainly got it.
From ACM Opinion
Is High-Tech Security at Public Events Counterproductive?
Which is more intrusive: security screening and metal detectors every few blocks, or a drone flying high above it taking video of every little thing you do?
From ACM Opinion
Apple Shouldn't Make Software Look Like Real Objects
Last fall Apple fired executive Scott Forstall, considered by many to be a Steve Jobs protégé.
From ACM Opinion
How the Icloud Hack Happened and How to Avoid Being Next
Mat Honan, the technology reporter who was digitally disemboweled this past weekend, has revealed exactly how he was so spectacularly owned. His case, a cascade...
From ACM Opinion
se It Better: The Worst Trends in Tech
Consumer technology doesn't always get better, faster and cheaper. Here are four bad moves that prove the future isn't always bright.
From ACM Opinion
Big Progress on the Little Things
In the trenches of consumer technology, there’s plenty to complain about. Today's cell-phone contracts are exorbitant and illogical (why has the price of a text...
From ACM Opinion
Why Gadgets Flop
According to the old saying, you learn more from a failure than a success. Well, if that's the case, the consumer electronics industry ought to have a master's...
From ACM News
Electronic Health Records Face Human Hurdles More Than Technological Ones
In medicine, there's the patient and there's the chart. And the chart is paper.
From ACM Opinion