Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM News
2 Years After FBI vs. Apple, Encryption Debate Remains
It's been two years since the FBI and Apple got into a giant fight over encryption following the San Bernardino shooting, when the government had the shooter's...
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
19th-Century Paleontology Was at the Forefront of Big Data
In 1981, when I was 9 years old, my father took me to see Raiders of the Lost Ark.
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
How Snapchat Is Sending #MeToo Down the Memory Hole
If you have something personal or private to communicate, you know where to turn.
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
Your Mobile Phone Can Give Away Your Location, Even If You Tell It Not to
U.S. military officials were recently caught off guard by revelations that servicemembers' digital fitness trackers were storing the locations of their workouts—including...
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
What China's Frightening Digital Strategy Portends For America's Future
If we were given the capacity to track and feel one another's emotions, would we behave better?
From ACM Opinion
5 Ways Election Interference Could (and Probably Will) Worsen in 2018 and Beyond
If you thought 2016 was bad, just wait for the sequel.
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
My Pacemaker Is Tracking Me from Inside My Body
A month before turning 34, I received an unexpected birthday gift: a cloud-connected pacemaker.
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