Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
Every Little Byte Counts
In "On What We Can Not Do," a short and pungent essay published a few years ago, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben outlined two ways in which power operates...
From ACM News
Do We Need Asimov's Laws?
In 1942, the science fiction author Isaac Asimov published a short story called Runaround in which he introduced three laws that governed the behaviour of robots...
From ACM Opinion
The Not-So-Distant Future When We Can All pgrade Our Brains
In a decade, cognitive enhancement may have gone mainstream.
From ACM Opinion
Cassini Revisited
When its handlers finally steer it into a collision course with Saturn in 2017, the spacecraft Cassini will have been in space for two decades, 13 of those years...
From ACM Opinion
Want to Learn Quicker? se Your Body
Ever got to grips with a problem? Picked up a new skill? Grasped a difficult concept? The language of learning is full of references to parts of the body outside...
From ACM Opinion
'transcendence Looks at the Implications of Artificial Intelligence, but Are We Taking AI Seriously Enough?'
With the Hollywood blockbuster Transcendence playing in cinemas, with Johnny Depp and Morgan Freeman showcasing clashing visions for the future of humanity, it's...
From ACM News
Cyborg Angst: 5 Ways Computers Will Perplex S in 2039
Brain chips mean we are struggling to distinguish our own thoughts from ideas implanted by advertisers.
From ACM Opinion
One niverse, One Life: A Conjecture
Opening Disclaimer 1: Although there may be more than one universe, as per the hypothetical multiverse, we will humbly submit to our own bubble of information,...
From ACM Opinion
Warp Drive Research Key to Interstellar Travel
As any avid Star Trek fan can tell you, the eccentric physicist Zefram Cochrane invented the warp-drive engine in the year 2063.
From ACM Opinion
Habitable Exoplanets Are Bad News For Humanity
Last week, scientists announced the discovery of Kepler-186f, a planet 492 light years away in the Cygnus constellation.
From Communications of the ACM
Tom Kilburn: A Tale of Five Computers
Reflections on a British computer engineer who influenced several important machines, including the first stored-program computer.
From ACM Opinion
I Didn't Type This Article
I'm dictating it to my iPhone as I walk down the busy city street on the way to my office in the West Village.
From ACM Opinion
The Cloud Industry Needs Aereo to Win. But Consumers Need Something Better.
The best way to think about Aereo, the company at the center of this week's Supreme Court battle over the future of computing, is as an example of legal performance...
From ACM Opinion
The Limits of Social Engineering
In 1969, Playboy published a long, freewheeling interview with Marshall McLuhan in which the media theorist and sixties icon sketched a portrait of the future that...
From ACM Opinion
How America's Leading Science Fiction Authors Are Shaping Your Future
Stories set in the future are often judged, as time passes, on whether they come true or not.
From ACM News
Is There Anything Beyond Quantum Computing?
A quantum computer is a device that could exploit the weirdness of the quantum world to solve certain specific problems much faster than we know how to solve them...
From ACM Opinion