Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
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
A Framework for Building Artificial Intelligence Capabilities
After decades of promise and hype, artificial intelligence has finally reached a tipping point of market acceptance.
From ACM News
Has Dopamine Got s Hooked on Tech?
In an unprecedented attack of candour, Sean Parker, the 38-year-old founding president of Facebook, recently admitted that the social network was founded not to...
From ACM Opinion
The Limits of Explainability
When we look at a stack of blocks or a stack of Oreos, we intuitively have a sense of how stable it is, whether it might fall over, and in what direction it may...
From ACM Opinion
Tech Companies Should Stop Pretending AI Won't Destroy Jobs
I took an Uber to an artificial-intelligence conference at MIT one recent morning, and the driver asked me how long it would take for autonomous vehicles to take...
From Communications of the ACM
The Computing Profession
Taking stock of progress toward a computing profession since this column started in 2001.
From ACM Opinion
How to Make Replication the Norm
Replication is essential for building confidence in research studies, yet it is still the exception rather than the rule.
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
How Technology Can Make Valentine's Day Much, Much Better
Every February I agonize over the Valentine's Day Dilemma. How can I show my girlfriend, whom I'll call Emily, how much I love her?
From ACM Opinion
Blockchain Explained: It Builds Trust When You Need It Most
These days, we're having a harder and harder time trusting each other.
From ACM Opinion
Computational Propaganda: Bots, Targeting, and the Future
A long time ago, when I was working on my Ph.D. research, I learned to use supercomputers to track the complex 3-D motions of gas blown into space by dying stars...
From ACM Opinion
Welcome to the Post-Text Future
I'll make this short: The thing you're doing now, reading prose on a screen, is going out of fashion.
From ACM Opinion
Mourning John Perry Barlow, the Bard of the Internet
When I first met John Perry Barlow, we became instant soulmates. While that sentence is true for me, it also applies to probably 10,000 other people.
From ACM Opinion
Why Cops Won't Need a Warrant to Pull the Data Off Your Autonomous Car
Lt. Saul Jaeger, who commands the traffic unit at the Mountain View Police Department, remembers the first time a few years ago when he was given a demo of Waymo's...
From ACM Opinion
Our Hackable Political Future
Imagine it is the spring of 2019. A bottom-feeding website, perhaps tied to Russia, "surfaces" video of a sex scene starring an 18-year-old Kirsten Gillibrand. ...
From ACM Opinion
Want Awesome Robots? You'll Have to Best These Challenges
We are living in the midst of a profound technological restructuring of human society. The machines that once only frolicked in science fiction have begun to infiltrate...
From ACM Opinion
Bubble, Bubble, Fraud and Trouble
The other day my barber asked me whether he should put all his money in Bitcoin. And the truth is that if he'd bought Bitcoin, say, a year ago he'd be feeling pretty...
From ACM Opinion
Technology to Watch in 2018
For all the excitement surrounding the gene-editing tool CRISPR, it is not that efficient or precise. It's hard to make many changes at once.
From ACM Opinion
For AI to Get Creative, It Must Learn the Rules, Then How to Break 'em
American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "Every artist was first an amateur." He likely never thought those words would apply to machines.
From ACM Opinion