Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
The FAA Rigorously Tested the Boeing 737's Software
Two Boeing 737 Max 8 airplanes have crashed under similar circumstances in the past six months, one in October in Indonesia and the other in Ethiopia last week....
From ACM Opinion
7 Arguments Against the Autonomous-Vehicle Utopia
Self-driving cars are coming. Tech giants such as Uber and Alphabet have bet on it, as have old-school car manufacturers such as Ford and General Motors.
From ACM Opinion
Video Doesn't Capture Truth
The White House has revoked the press pass of Jim Acosta, CNN's chief White House correspondent, after a testy exchange between the reporter and President Trump...
From ACM Opinion
How the Enlightenment Ends
Three years ago, at a conference on transatlantic issues, the subject of artificial intelligence appeared on the agenda. I was on the verge of skipping that session—it...
From ACM Opinion
The Era of Fake Video Begins
In a dank corner of the internet, it is possible to find actresses from Game of Thrones or Harry Potter engaged in all manner of sex acts. Or at least to the world...
From ACM Opinion
Enough With the Trolley Problem
You know the drill by now: A runaway trolley is careening down a track. There are five workers ahead, sure to be killed if the trolley reaches them.
From ACM Opinion
My Cow Game Extracted Your Facebook Data
For a spell during 2010 and 2011, I was a virtual rancher of clickable cattle on Facebook.
From ACM Opinion
Retweets Are Trash
A couple of months ago, I made a small tweak to my Twitter account that has changed my experience of the platform.
From ACM Opinion
China's Dystopian Tech Could Be Contagious
For all the particularities of life in China, its big cities offer a familiar cosmopolitanism.
From ACM Opinion
The New Way Your Computer Can Be Attacked
On January 3, the world learned about a series of major security vulnerabilities in modern microprocessors. Called Spectre and Meltdown, these vulnerabilities were...
From ACM Opinion
8 Overly Confident, Mostly Pessimistic Predictions About Tech in 2018
It was a very strange year for technology companies. They have become a "bipartisan whipping boy," a new sexist institution, responsible for the muddying of the...
From ACM Opinion
Driverless Cars Could Make Transportation Free For Everyone, With a Catch
As self-driving cars inch closer to everyday reality, journalists, futurists, economists, and ethicists have weighed in with numerous predictions about autonomous...
From ACM Opinion
A nified Theory of Meme Death
Memes aren't built to last. This is an accepted fact of online life.
From ACM Opinion
How Driverless Cars Will Change the Feel of Cities
It's 6 p.m. in Tempe, Arizona and pitch-black outside. I'm standing in the middle of a five-lane thoroughfare, among a group of people too numerous for the narrow...
From ACM Opinion
Should Children Form Emotional Bonds with Robots?
When i brought the robot home from the Apple Store, I knew I was inviting a new kind of strangeness into our lives.
From ACM News
The Coming Software Apocalypse
There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service.
From ACM Opinion
You Are Already Living Inside a Computer
Suddenly, everything is a computer. Phones, of course, and televisions. Also toasters and door locks, baby monitors and juicers, doorbells and gas grills. Even ...
From ACM Opinion
When Companies Get Hacked, Should They Be Allowed to Hack Back?
There is an old debate (at least, counting in internet years) that tends to crop up after major cybersecurity breaches such as the widespread WannaCry ransomware...
From ACM Opinion
For Google, Everything Is a Popularity Contest
When I saw that Google had introduced a "Classic Papers" section of Google Scholar, its search tool for academic journals, I couldn't help but stroke my chin professorially...
From ACM Opinion