Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
The False Science of Cryonics
I woke up on Saturday to a heartbreaking front-page article in the New York Times about a terminally ill young woman who chooses to freeze her brain.
From ACM News
Who Will Own the Robots?
The way Hod Lipson describes his Creative Machines Lab captures his ambitions: "We are interested in robots that create and are creative."
From ACM Opinion
Why Robots and Humans Struggled with Darpa's Challenge
When some of the world's most advanced rescue robots are foiled by nothing more complex than a doorknob, you get a good sense of the challenge of making our homes...
From ACM Opinion
Toolkits For the Mind
When the Japanese computer scientist Yukihiro Matsumoto decided to create Ruby, a programming language that has helped build Twitter, Hulu, and much of the modern...
From ACM Opinion
Reality Check: Comparing Hololens and Magic Leap
I've seen two competing visions for a future in which virtual objects are merged seamlessly with the real world.
From ACM Opinion
Our Fear of Artificial Intelligence
Years ago I had coffee with a friend who ran a startup.
From ACM News
2014 in Computing: Breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence
The holy grail of artificial intelligence—creating software that comes close to mimicking human intelligence—remains far off. But 2014 saw major strides in machine...
From ACM Opinion
What Are Moocs Good For?
A few years ago, the most enthusiastic advocates of MOOCs believed that these "massive open online courses" stood poised to overturn the century-old model of higher...
From ACM Opinion
Isaac Asimov Mulls 'how Do People Get New Ideas?'
In 1959, I worked as a scientist at Allied Research Associates in Boston.
From ACM Opinion
The History Inside S
Every day our DNA breaks a little. Special enzymes keep our genome intact while we're alive, but after death, once the oxygen runs out, there is no more repair.
From ACM Opinion
In Praise of Efficient Price Gouging
In the four years since the car service Uber launched, it has been beset by criticism from myriad groups, including city officials annoyed by its sometimes cavalier...
From ACM Opinion
Imposing Security
Three computer bugs this year exposed passwords, e-mails, financial data, and other kinds of sensitive information connected to potentially billions of people.
From ACM News
Do We Need Asimov's Laws?
In 1942, the science fiction author Isaac Asimov published a short story called Runaround in which he introduced three laws that governed the behaviour of robots...
From ACM Opinion
The Limits of Social Engineering
In 1969, Playboy published a long, freewheeling interview with Marshall McLuhan in which the media theorist and sixties icon sketched a portrait of the future that...
From ACM Opinion
Glass, Darkly
Google Glass shares much of its electronics and software with the smartphone, but it's a very different machine.
From ACM Opinion
Why Google Kept Motorola's Research Lab
Google's $2.9 billion sale of Motorola Mobility to Chinese PC maker Lenovo might seem like lousy business, given Google's $12.5 billion purchase in 2012 and losses...
From ACM Opinion
An AI Pal That Is Better Than 'her'
In the movie Her, which was nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture this year, a middle-aged writer named Theodore Twombly installs and rapidly falls in love with...
From ACM Opinion
Diagnosis For Healthcare.gov: nrealistic Technology Expectations
The fiasco with the $600 million federal health insurance website wasn't all bureaucratic.
From ACM Opinion