Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
How to Turn Your Self-Driving Car Into a Time Machine
The self-driving car's greatest promise is that it will buy its passengers that most precious and finite of resources: time.
From ACM Opinion
How Long ntil Hackers Start Faking Leaked Documents?
In the past few years, the devastating effects of hackers breaking into an organization's network, stealing confidential data, and publishing everything have been...
From ACM Opinion
How Electronic Voting Could ndermine the Election
It's 2016: What possible reason is there to vote on paper? When we use touchscreens to communicate, work, and shop, why can't we use similar technology to vote?
From ACM Opinion
Will the Constitution Protect Your Next Smartphone?
More than a decade ago, the keynote speaker at a major annual cybersecurity conference strode into the spotlight and predicted the death of the password.
From ACM Opinion
Elegy For the Capital-I Internet
We've long stopped referring to the Internet as "the information superhighway," but there was a reason for the metaphor.
From ACM Opinion
The Privacy Problem with Digital Assistants
For the last century, we've imagined a future where we're surrounded by robotic butlers that are classy, smart, and discreet.
From ACM Opinion
The Seven Deadly Social Networks
Almost five years ago, in a soliloquy transcribed by The Wall Street Journal, Reid Hoffman suggested a comprehensive theory of social-network success.
From ACM Opinion
You Can't Escape Data Surveillance In America
In America, surveillance has always played an outsized role in the relationship between creditors and debtors.
From ACM Opinion
One Easy Way to Make Wikipedia Better
The Pacific Northwest tree octopus existed years before Wikipedia was founded. I’m using "existed" loosely here, of course, because there's no such thing as a Pacific...
From ACM Opinion
How Early Computer Games Influenced Internet Culture
Sometimes it seems the Internet is, at its core, a tremendous nostalgia machine.
From ACM Opinion
How Self-Driving Cars Will Threaten Privacy
Allow me to join you, if I may, on your morning commute sometime in the indeterminate future.
From ACM Opinion
Toward the End of Pilots
A memory that’s stayed with me from my stint in the military nearly 50 years ago is a sign that my supply sergeant kept on his desk: "We’ve been working with less...
From ACM Opinion
Can Google's Driverless Car Project Survive a Fatal Accident?
Everybody knew this day would come.
From ACM Opinion
How to Build an nbeatable Poker-Playing Robot
Each summer, the computer-science researchers behind the world's best poker-playing robots bring their creations together for a tournament.
From ACM Opinion
How the Microscope Redefined the Fact
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the inverse is also true: A word is worth a thousand pictures.
From ACM Opinion
Planet Nine May Help S Slingshot Our Way to Interstellar Space
In his famous sonnet, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, John Keats describes the moment he first came to appreciate some of the great works of classical antiquity...
From ACM Opinion
How the Internet of Things Limits Consumer Choice
In theory, the Internet of Things—the connected network of tiny computers inside home appliances, household objects, even clothing—promises to make your life easier...
From ACM Opinion
Driverless Cars Are Like Elevators
One of the challenges in describing the potential of self-driving cars is that they promise to do so much.
From ACM Opinion
Pop Culture Is Finally Getting Hacking Right
The idea of a drill-wielding hacker who runs a deep-web empire selling drugs to teens seems like a fantasy embodying the worst of digital technology.
From ACM Opinion