Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
The Machine Zone: This Is Where You Go When You Just Can't Stop Looking at Pictures on Facebook
"People love Facebook. They really love it," Biz Stone wrote earlier this month. "My mother-in-law looks hypnotized when she decides to put in some Facebook time...
From ACM Opinion
What the Digital Brains of the Future Might Be Like
It is the rare entrepreneur who hits it truly big twice. Those who do—such as Ev Williams, Ted Turner, and Elon Musk—tend to stay within the original industry that...
From ACM Opinion
Governments Won't Need to Issue Ids: Data Brokers Will Identify You For Them
Our government collects a lot of information about us. Tax records, legal records, license records, records of government services received—it's all in databases...
From ACM Opinion
The Definitive Story of Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and Phone Phreaking
Like the flap of a butterfly's wings causing a hurricane half a world away, the ripples of unintended consequences from Ron Rosenbaum's "Secrets of the Little Blue...
From ACM Opinion
The Greatest Bond Villain of All: Technology
Tech has always played a prominent role in the Bond franchise; it's a key element of the plot formula: Bond opens with a chase scene, the core mission is revealed...
From ACM Opinion
Data Doesn't Belong to the Democrats
One of the leading narratives of the 2012 campaign is that data trumped all.
From ACM Opinion
The Consequences of Machine Intelligence
The question of what happens when machines get to be as intelligent as and even more intelligent than people seems to occupy many science-fiction writers.
From ACM Opinion
Google News at 10: How the Algorithm Won Over the News Industry
In April of 2010, Eric Schmidt delivered the keynote address at the conference of the American Society of News Editors in Washington, D.C. During the talk, thearticulate...
From ACM Opinion
Iphone 5? Yawn. What Will the 'phone' of 2022 Look Like?
The near-term future of phones is fairly well-established. The iPhone 5 was released Wednesday and its similarity to every Apple phone since 2007 serves as a reminder...
From ACM Opinion
Why There Are Too Many Patents in America
Recently, while sitting as a trial judge, I dismissed a case in which Apple and Motorola had sued each other for alleged infringement of patents for components...
From ACM Opinion
What the Well's Rise and Fall Tell S About Online Community
In the late 1980s, decades before the term "social media" existed, in a now legendary and miraculously still living virtual community called "The WELL," a fellow...
From ACM Opinion
Is It Possible to Wage a Just Cyberwar?
In the last week or so, cyberwarfare has made front-page news: the United States may have been behind the Stuxnet cyberattack on Iran; Iran may have suffered another...
From ACM Opinion
Why the Internet Makes It Impossible to Stop Giant Wall Street Losses
In 1984, Yale sociologist Charles Perrow published his classic book, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. The odd term, "normal accident," Perrow...
From ACM Opinion
How Computers Are Creating a Second Economy Without Workers
When the disappointing jobs numbers were reported last week (employers added 120,000 jobs in March, about half the number reported in the two previous months),...
From ACM Opinion
How Does Siri Knockoff Evi Compare to the Iphone's Original Digital Assistant?
Evi, the Siri knockoff that got attention last week for looking too much like Siri, has beendownloaded over 200,000 times, leading us to believe that this one might...
From ACM Opinion