Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
Why Is Our Sci-Fi So Glum About A.i.?
When I was 12, I invented a superhero named Boy Genius, a guy my age who awakens one morning with access to 100 percent of his brain power.
From ACM Opinion
Visualizing 4-Dimensional Asteroids
One of the largest treasure troves of astronomical data comes from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), an ongoing scan of the firmament that began 15 years ago...
From ACM Opinion
The $3.2 Billion Man: Can Google's Newest Star Outsmart Apple?
Lounging poolside in 93-degree July heat as Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" thrums through the patio speakers, Tony Fadell takes a sip of nonalcoholic beer and sinks far...
From ACM Opinion
You Should Be Terrified of Superintelligent Machines
In the recent discussion over the risks of developing superintelligent machines—that is, machines with general intelligence greater than that of humans—two narratives...
From ACM Opinion
Apple's Watch Will Make People and Computers More Intimate
A fundamental quest of the digital age has been to make our devices more personal.
From ACM Opinion
It’s Tim Cook's Apple Now
The Tim Cook era at Apple emerged onto the public stage today in full force, and it bears subtle differences from Steve Jobs’s Apple.
From ACM Opinion
Our Cyborg Future
In June 2014, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Riley v. California, in which the justices unanimously ruled that police officers may not, without a...
From ACM Opinion
Robot Servants Are Going to Make Your Life Easy. Then They'll Ruin It
Jibo, the "world's first family robot," hit the media hype machine like a bomb.
From ACM Careers
The Coming Age of the Internet Naturalist
Three years ago, Shaun Winterton was looking at photos of bugs on Flickr.
From ACM Opinion
The Case For Kill Switches in Military Weaponry
This summer the insurgent group ISIS captured the Iraqi city of Mosul—and along with it, three army divisions' worth of U.S.-supplied equipment from the Iraqi army...
From ACM Opinion
Singularity or Transhumanism: What Word Should We se to Discuss the Future?
Singularity. Posthuman. Techno-Optimism, Cyborgism. Humanity+. Immortalist. Machine intelligence. Biohacker. Robotopia. Life extension. Transhumanism.
From ACM Opinion
The History Inside S
Every day our DNA breaks a little. Special enzymes keep our genome intact while we're alive, but after death, once the oxygen runs out, there is no more repair.
From ACM Opinion
Why Big Data Has Some Big Problems When It Comes to Public Policy
For all the talk about using big data and data science to solve the world’s problems—and even all the talk about big data as one of the world’s problems—it seems...
From ACM Opinion
A nified Theory
For the last half-century we've had a popular notion that our intellectual culture is sundered in two—the literary and the scientific.
From ACM Opinion
Beyond Classic Brain Illustrations That Make S Drool
I threw down a bit of a challenge last month at the Association of Medical Illustrators Conference in Minnesota.
From ACM Opinion
Artificial Intelligence Will Not Turn Into a Frankenstein's Monster
The singularity—or, to give it its proper title, the technological singularity. It's an idea that has taken on a life of its own; more of a life, I suspect, than...
From ACM Opinion
I Liked Everything I Saw on Facebook For Two Days. Here's What It Did to Me
There's this great Andy Warhol quote you’ve probably seen before: "I think everybody should like everybody."
From ACM Opinion
How Wwi Codebreakers Taught Your Gas Meter to Snitch on You
In the depths of night on August 5th 1914 the British Cable Ship Alert took the first significant action of World War I, severing the five German submarine cables...
From ACM Opinion