Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
Why Animal Extinction Is Crippling Computer Science
Dodos. Western black rhinoceros. Tasmanian tigers. Bennett's seaweed. The list of extinct animal and plant species goes on and on.
From ACM Opinion
How America Could Lose the Quantum-Computing Race
There's an arms race underway to develop the next generation of computers—known as "quantum" computers—and there's no guarantee that the United States is going...
From ACM Opinion
In 1968, Computers Got Personal: How the 'Mother of All Demos' Changed the World
On a crisp California afternoon in early December 1968, a square-jawed, mild-mannered Stanford researcher named Douglas Engelbart took the stage at San Francisco's...
From ACM Opinion
How Bots Ruined Clicktivism
I recently came across two tweets—or rather, thousands of tweets sharing the same two ideas over and over again.
From ACM Opinion
What Worries People about Future Science and Tech Innovations?
Many Americans see the future crowding into the present and some of the innovations ahead unnerve them, especially as they reshape ideas about human dominion.
From ACM Opinion
The Problem With Terraforming Mars
Mars has loomed large throughout human history, our imaginations filling its red vistas with fantastic detail long before our space missions returned even rudimentary...
From ACM Opinion
China Is Overtaking the .S. in Scientific Research
Thirty years ago in December, the modern exchange of scholars between the U.S. and China began.
From ACM Opinion
Safe Artificial Intelligence Requires Cultural Intelligence
Knowledge, to paraphrase British journalist Miles Kington, is knowing a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing there's a norm against putting it in a fruit salad....
From ACM Opinion
Ten Years of Large Hadron Collider Discoveries Are Just the Start of Decoding the niverse
Ten years! Ten years since the start of operations for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), one of the most complex machines ever created.
From ACM Opinion
How Will Google's Innovation Continue Beyond Its 20th Year?
As millions of people came online in the late 1990s they needed help figuring out what each webpage was about, and how to find what they were looking for.
From ACM Opinion
Fake America Great Again
Guess what? I just got hold of some embarrassing video footage of Texas senator Ted Cruz singing and gyrating to Tina Turner. His political enemies will have great...
From ACM Opinion
Are We Ready for the Future of Warfare?
Warfare has always been about exerting political will.
From ACM Opinion
Math Shows How DNA Twists, Turns and nzips
If you've ever seen a picture of a DNA molecule, you probably saw it in its famous B-form: two strands coiling around each other in a right-handed fashion to form...
From ACM News
Here's What We Know about Google's Mysterious Search Engine
President Trump thinks Google's search engine is "rigged." By featuring more mainstream news outlets and relatively fewer conservative sites in the results he sees...
From ACM Opinion
Detecting 'DeepFake' Videos in the Blink of an Eye
A new form of misinformation is poised to spread through online communities as the 2018 midterm election campaigns heat up. Called "deepfakes" after the pseudonymous...
From ACM Opinion
It's Not Technology That's Disrupting Our Jobs
When we learn about the Industrial Revolution in school, we hear a lot about factories, steam engines, maybe the power loom.
From Communications of the ACM
Navigating with Accelerating Technology Change
Mathematical tools such as S-curves locate inflection points in technology-accelerated social spaces; where we move next depends on our navigational skills.
From Communications of the ACM
An Academic's Observations from a Sabbatical at Google
How experiences gained in industry can improve academic research and teaching.
From Communications of the ACM
Is Software the Result of Top-Down Intelligent Design or Evolution?
Considering the potential danger to individuals of rapid coevolution.
From ACM Opinion