Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
How Bots Ruined Clicktivism
I recently came across two tweets—or rather, thousands of tweets sharing the same two ideas over and over again.
From ACM Opinion
Google Tracks You Even If Location History's Off. Here's How to Stop It
If, like most people, you thought Google stopped tracking your location once you turned off Location History in your account settings, you were wrong.
From ACM Opinion
Why Westerners Fear Robots and the Japanese Do Not
As a Japanese, I grew up watching anime like "Neon Genesis Evangelion," which depicts a future in which machines and humans merge into cyborg ecstasy.
From ACM Opinion
How Plausible Are All Those Mission: Impossible Gadgets, Anyway?
It's been 22 years since Tom Cruise infiltrated a CIA vault suspended from a wire in the first Mission: Impossible flick.
From ACM Opinion
A Landmark Legal Shift Opens Pandora's Box for DIY Guns
Five years ago, 25-year-old radical libertarian Cody Wilson stood on a remote central Texas gun range and pulled the trigger on the world's first fully 3-D-printed...
From ACM Opinion
A Plea for AI That Serves Humanity Instead of Replacing It
Sixty-two years ago this summer, Dartmouth professor John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence. Joi Ito, director of MIT's Media Lab, has come to think...
From ACM Opinion
Autonomous Vehicles Might Drive Cities to Financial Ruin
In Ann Arbor, Michigan, last week, 125 mostly white, mostly male, business-card-bearing attendees crowded into a brightly lit ballroom to consider "mobility."
From ACM Opinion
Going To the World Cup? Leave the Laptop at Home
A Russian sports official earlier this year estimated that as many as 2 million people would flock to the country during the World Cup, the month-long celebration...
From ACM Opinion
Self-Driving Cars Likely Won't Steal Your Job (ntil 2040)
The self-driving robots are coming to transform your job. Kind of. Also, very slowly.
From ACM Opinion
The Many Shades of Bad Physics
What happens when you see bad physics in the world? Does it make you angry? Does it make you laugh?
From ACM Opinion
The Responsibility of Immortality: Welcome to the New Transhumanism
In the summer of 1990, I was running a pretty weird nightclub in the Roppongi neighborhood of Tokyo.
From ACM Opinion
How Wired Lost $100,000 in Bitcoin
Back in 2013, when you could still mine bitcoins at home, Wired was sent a small, sleek mining device manufactured by the now-defunct Butterfly Labs.
From ACM Opinion
Europe's New Data Protections Will Affect You Too. Here's How.
Starting tomorrow, a new framework for consumer data protection goes into effect in Europe.
From ACM Opinion
Facial Recognition Tech Is Creepy When It Works, And Creepier When It Doesn't
For the last few years, police forces around China have invested heavily to build the world's largest video surveillance and facial recognition system, incorporating...
From ACM Opinion
When John Doerr Brought a 'Gift' to Google's Founders
On a fall day in 1999, in the heart of Silicon Valley, I arrived at a two-story, L-shaped structure off the 101 freeway. It was young Google's headquarters, and...
From ACM Opinion
Why Police Should Monitor Social Media to Prevent Crime
In February, the ACLU of Massachusetts released a damning report detailing prejudice in social media surveillance efforts by the Boston Police Department (BPD)....
From ACM Opinion
The Questions Zuckerberg Should Have Answered About Russia
Over the last two days, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was questioned for more than 10 hours by two different Congressional committees. There was granular focus on...
From ACM Opinion
The Next Cold War Is Here, and It's All About Data
The headlines about the trade wars being touched off by President Trump's new tariffs may telegraph plenty of bombast and shots fired, but the most consequential...
From ACM Opinion
The Blockchain Solution to Our Deepfake Problems
Blockchain has always seemed to me like a solution looking for a problem, which isn't a criticism.
From ACM Opinion