Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
There's Nowhere to Hide on the Internet
Sometime before dawn on March 29th, not too many hours after Congress approved legislation that allows Internet-service providers to sell your browsing historyInternet...
From ACM Opinion
What If We Had Perfect Robot Referees
Last month, Mark Clattenburg, who is generally regarded as one of the finest referees in professional soccer, left England's Premier League for a better-paying...
From ACM Opinion
Reality Bites: Learning the Future of V.r. at Sundance
Standing in a pink desert landscape, I looked down and realized I'd become a robot, with skinny metal legs and pincers for hands.
From ACM Opinion
The Hype, and Hope, of Artificial Intelligence
Earlier this month, on his HBO show "Last Week Tonight," John Oliver skewered media companies' desperate search for clicks.
From ACM Opinion
Why Facebook Is Really Blocking the Ad Blockers
Ads can seem like the bane of the Internet.
From ACM Opinion
All Alone in No Man's Sky
If reality is a game—a vast, snow-globe-y sort of experiment that plays out according to the hard rules of physics and the loose rules of story—then it is, in contemporary...
From ACM Opinion
Could Brain Training Prevent Dementia?
It's been a lousy couple of years for researchers who study the effects of computerized brain training.
From ACM Opinion
Pokémon Go Will Make You Crave Augmented Reality
It started as an April Fool's joke.
From ACM Opinion
For the Golden State Warriors, Brain-Zapping Could Provide an Edge
Back in March, James Michael McAdoo, the power forward for the Golden State Warriors, tweeted out a photo of himself in the training room, sporting a pair of slick...
From ACM Opinion
What Are the Odds We Are Living in a Computer Simulation?
Last week, Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and other cutting-edge companies, took a surprising question at the Code Conference, a technology...
From ACM Opinion
The Coming Horror of Virtual Reality
If Kitchen, a five-minute virtual-reality demo created by the Japanese studio Capcom, were a short film, few viewers would be moved to panic by its misery of horror...
From ACM Opinion
What Would Happen If G.p.s. Failed?
The radio signal that is the lifeblood of the Global Positioning System originates from a constellation of twenty-four satellites, orbiting more than twelve thousand...
From ACM Opinion
Will Smell Ever Come to Smartphones?
Two years ago, at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, I witnessed David Edwards receive what he claimed was the world's first transatlantic ...
From ACM Opinion
Lessons from Apple vs. the F.b.i.
It's welcome news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has dropped its legal effort to force Apple to help it create a method of accessing data on a lockedSan...
From ACM Opinion
Google's New Autoreply Sounds Great!!!!
On April 1, 2009, Google unveiled Gmail Autopilot, a plug-in that promised to read and generate contextually relevant replies to the messages piling up in users'...
From ACM Opinion
How the Internet Has Changed Bullying
This summer, American Psychologist, the official journal of the American Psychological Association, released a special issue on the topic of bullying and victimization...
From ACM Opinion
Two Paths Toward Our Robot Future
In 1970, Life magazine published an article about a Stanford University research project that had resulted in the construction of what it called the first-ever...
From ACM Opinion
A Beginner's Guide to Invisibility
It is possible, according to many sources, to become invisible, but you must be patient, methodical, and willing to eat almost anything.
From ACM Opinion
In Search of the Keys to the Virtual City
I'm not the first man to believe that he might fix London.
From ACM Opinion