Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
The Senate's Draft Encryption Bill Is 'ludicrous, Dangerous, Technically Illiterate'
As Apple Battled the FBI for the last two months over the agency's demands that Apple help crack its own encryption, both the tech community and law enforcement...
From ACM Opinion
When Is the Singularity? Probably Not in Your Lifetime
Misconception: Computers will outstrip human capabilities within many of our lifetimes.
From ACM Opinion
What If Apple Is Wrong?
Soon after Devon Godfrey was shot to death in his apartment in Harlem on the evening of April 12, 2010, officers with the New York Police Department thought they...
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
To Beat Go Champion, Google's Program Needed a Human Army
Nearly 20 years ago, after a chess-playing computer called Deep Blue beat the world grandmaster Garry Kasparov, I wrote an article about why humans would long remain...
From ACM Opinion
Is Alphago Really Such a Big Deal?
In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue system defeated the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov.
From ACM Opinion
Mind Craft
Concerned because you can't pry your daughter away from Minecraft? Worried that your son spends every moment obsessing over moves in the super-popular video game...
From ACM Opinion
se or Lose Our Navigation Skills
In 1984, I was part of a team that was developing a receiver for a satellite-navigation system. After weeks of debugging, the blur of random digits settled on a...
From ACM Opinion
What Would Marvin Minsky Read?
Marvin Minsky was one of the founders of artificial intelligence, and with John McCarthy, he created MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory...
From ACM Opinion
Why Technological Innovation Relies on Government Support
Andy Grove, the Silicon Valley pioneer who died last week at age 79, was many things: a survivor of the Nazi occupation of Hungary and refugee of Cold War Eastern...
From ACM Opinion
Andy Grove's Warning to Silicon Valley
The praise this week for Andy Grove, who died on Monday at age 79, has been wrapped up in praise for Silicon Valley, where he was a towering figure in the semiconductor...
From ACM Opinion
Feds Set a Risky Precedent By Indicting 7 Iranian Hackers
This week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) created a potentially dangerous precedent when it indicted seven Iranian hackers involved in attacks on the US financial...
From ACM Opinion
How Self-Driving Cars Will Threaten Privacy
Allow me to join you, if I may, on your morning commute sometime in the indeterminate future.
From ACM Opinion
The Internet of Things Is a Surveillance Nightmare
In 2014, security guru Bruce Schneier said, "Surveillance is the business model of the Internet.
From ACM Opinion
The Law Is Clear: The Fbi Cannot Make Apple Rewrite its Os
Every once in a while, President Obama removes his Law Professor in Chief hat and puts on his I Get Terrifying Briefings Every Day hat.
From ACM Opinion
Is Blockchain the Most Important It Invention of Our Age?
There are not many occasions when one can give an unqualified thumbs-up to something the government does, but this is one such occasion.
From ACM Opinion
Where Computers Defeat Humans, and Where They Can't
ALPHAGO, the artificial intelligence system built by the Google subsidiary DeepMind, has just defeated the human champion, Lee Se-dol, four games to one in the...
From ACM Opinion
Explosive Golf Video Game Has the Best Physics Simulation Ever
Before teeing off, I take a few seconds to line up the shot.
From ACM Opinion