Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
How the Enlightenment Ends
Three years ago, at a conference on transatlantic issues, the subject of artificial intelligence appeared on the agenda. I was on the verge of skipping that session—it...
From ACM Opinion
How Fortnite Captured Teens' Hearts and Minds
It was getting late in Tomato Town. The storm was closing in, and meteors pelted the ground.
From ACM Opinion
The Singularity Is Not Near: The Intellectual Fraud of the 'Singularitarians'
Technology was identified as the true official religion of the modern state more than seventy years ago by the late Christian anarchist philosopher Jacques Ellul...
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
Free Will, Video Games, and the Most Profound Quantum Mystery
The word "predictable" first entered the English language two centuries ago.
From ACM Opinion
'2001: A Space Odyssey' Is Still the 'ltimate Trip'
In the spring of 1964 the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was very worried. NASA was about to fly the Mariner 4 space probe past Mars.
From ACM Opinion
Google's Duplex Could Make Assistant the Most Lifelike AI Yet
The conversation seems mundane. At least, at first.
From ACM Opinion
How Frightened Should We Be of A.I.?
Precisely how and when will our curiosity kill us?
From ACM Opinion
One Space Between Each Sentence, They Said. Science Just Proved Them Wrong.
In the beginning, the rules of the space bar were simple. Two spaces after each period. Every time. Easy.
From ACM Opinion
Forging Voices and Faces: The Dangers of Audio and Video Fabrication
In 1963, before he could give the speech he'd prepared for his trip to Dallas, U.S. president John F. Kennedy was assassinated. In March 2018, a company re-created...
From ACM Opinion
The Facebook Controversy: Privacy Is Not the Issue
Cambridge Analytica's wholesale scraping of Facebook user data is familiar news by now, and we are all "shocked" that personal data are being shared and traded...
From ACM Opinion
Autonomous Weapons Would Take Warfare to a New Domain, Without Humans
Killer robots have been a staple of TV and movies for decades, from Westworld to The Terminator series. But in the real world, killer robots are officially known...
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
'2001: A Space Odyssey': What It Means, and How It Was Made
Fifty years ago this spring, Stanley Kubrick's confounding sci-fi masterpiece, "2001: A Space Odyssey," had its premières across the country.
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 'Terms and Conditions' Reckoning Is Coming
Eleanor Margolis had used PayPal for more than a decade when the online payment provider blocked her account in January. The reason: She was 16 years old when she...
From ACM Opinion
Here's How Hackers Could Cause Chaos in This Year's S Midterm Elections
On November 6, Americans will head to the polls to vote in the congressional midterm elections. In the months before the contest, hordes of foreign hackers will...
From ACM Opinion
Regulate Artificial Intelligence to Avert Cyber Arms Race
Cyberattacks are becoming more frequent, sophisticated and destructive. Each day in 2017, the United States suffered, on average, more than 4,000 ransomware attacks...
From ACM Opinion
We May Own Our Data, But Facebook Has a Duty to Protect It
Two years ago, Jack M. Balkin, a constitutional-law professor at Yale, published a fifty-page article in the U.C. Davis Law Review examining what he called problems...
From ACM Opinion