Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
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
In Praise of Efficient Price Gouging
In the four years since the car service Uber launched, it has been beset by criticism from myriad groups, including city officials annoyed by its sometimes cavalier...
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
How to Save the Net: Keep It Open
For all of its history, the Internet has enjoyed the fruits of an openness principle: the idea that anyone can reach any site online and that information and data...
From ACM Opinion
Anatomy of an Air Strike: Three Intelligence Streams Working in Concert
In a fast-moving war with an elusive foe like the Islamic State militants, information is as important as guns, jet fighters and bombs.
From ACM Opinion
Police Cameras Can Shed Light, but Raise Privacy Concerns
Michael Brown, the unarmed teenager who was shot during an encounter with police in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 9, was recorded by a convenience store surveillance camera...
From ACM Opinion
Could Google Glass Ruin Your Memory?
We’ve all done it: We’re at an event, we take a bunch of photos with our phones, we take a selfie and maybe one with a friend, we post all the images online,...
From ACM Opinion
Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
All these people are trying to kill email.
From ACM Opinion
Why the Public Library Beats Amazon—for Now
A growing stack of companies would like you to pay a monthly fee to read e-books, just like you subscribe to Netflix to binge on movies and TV shows.
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
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
Security Secrets, Dated but Real
Was the National Cryptologic Museum designed using a code of some kind?
From ACM Opinion
A Tool That Answers 'what's That Typeface?'
The Internet is, from its very core to its most distant peripheries, a vast universe of text.
From ACM Opinion
The Weird Reasons Why People Make p False Identities on the Internet
Sockpuppetry—using false identities for deception—is centuries old, but the advent of the web has made creating sockpuppets, and falling for their tricks, easier...
From ACM Opinion
Why Is Science Fiction So Hard to Define?
Time Out, the weekly listings magazine, recently ranked the 100 best sci-fi movies of all time.
From ACM Opinion
Google Bets a Billion Dollars on Twitch
Video gaming differentiates itself from the older forms of escapism—literature, theatre, film, television—with interactivity.
From ACM Opinion
How to Invent a Person Online
On April 8, 2013, I received an envelope in the mail from a nonexistent return address in Toledo, Ohio.
From ACM Opinion
When Robots Come For Our Jobs, Will We Be Ready to Outsmart Them?
Non-human employees are filling positions in all sorts of workplaces, and they are proving themselves to be fast, accurate, and reliable—more so than their human...
From ACM Opinion