Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
Steve Jobs Was a Low-Tech Parent
When Steve Jobs was running Apple, he was known to call journalists to either pat them on the back for a recent article or, more often than not, explain how they...
From ACM Opinion
A nified Theory
For the last half-century we've had a popular notion that our intellectual culture is sundered in two—the literary and the scientific.
From ACM Opinion
Police Cameras Can Shed Light, but Raise Privacy Concerns
Michael Brown, the unarmed teenager who was shot during an encounter with police in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 9, was recorded by a convenience store surveillance camera...
From ACM Opinion
Security Secrets, Dated but Real
Was the National Cryptologic Museum designed using a code of some kind?
From ACM Opinion
The Next Big Thing in Hardware: Smart Garbage
There's a box on a shelf in my closet stuffed with smart smoke detectors, old smartphones, chargers, battery cases, fitness trackers, a Kindle that I sat on and...
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Robot Caregivers
Each time I make a house call, I stay much longer than I should.
From ACM Opinion
The Trouble With Brain Science
Are we ever going to figure out how the brain works?
From ACM Opinion
Should Facebook Manipulate sers?
Should we worry that technology companies can secretly influence our emotions?
From ACM Opinion
The Tech-Savvy Supreme Court
The two major technology-related decisions handed down by the Supreme Court this week have been widely greeted by people in the tech industry as one win and one...
From ACM Opinion
Every Little Byte Counts
In "On What We Can Not Do," a short and pungent essay published a few years ago, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben outlined two ways in which power operates...
From ACM Opinion
Should Young Children Learn Coding?
Re "Reading, Writing, Arithmetic and Now Coding" (front page, May 11): Schools and parents are really off the mark in introducing coding (and technology in general)...
From ACM Opinion
Ordering Google to Forget
In a ruling that could undermine press freedoms and free speech, the highest court of the European Union said on Tuesday that Google must comply with requests from...
From ACM Opinion
The Peril of Knowledge Everywhere
Thanks to advances in technology, we may soon revisit a question raised four centuries ago: Are there things we should try not to know?
From ACM Opinion
The Move Toward Computing That Reads Your Mind
Like many people in this modern world, I struggle with the tension between the conveniences offered by the latest technology and the loss of privacy that comes...
From ACM Opinion
The Cloud Industry Needs Aereo to Win. But Consumers Need Something Better.
The best way to think about Aereo, the company at the center of this week's Supreme Court battle over the future of computing, is as an example of legal performance...
From ACM Opinion
If You Like Immersion, You'll Love This Reality
The news that Facebook paid $2 billion for a virtual reality start-up, Oculus VR, might strike you as a bit zany.
From ACM Opinion
Hey, Robot: Which Cat Is Cuter?
One recent morning, while contemplating writing this column, I scrolled through thousands and thousands of listings for mundane microgigs on Mechanical Turk, or...
From ACM Opinion
Abstract Ideas Don't Deserve Patents
The Constitution gives Congress the power to grant inventors a temporary monopoly over their creations to "promote the progress of science and useful arts."
From ACM Opinion
Discovering Two Screens Aren't Better Than One
For years, techies have argued that getting an extra monitor or two for your desktop computer is an especially effective way to increase personal productivity.
From ACM Opinion