Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
Don't Blame China, Mr. President. Blame the Robots.
Mr. President, if you're looking for someone to demonize for killing blue-collar jobs in your favorite industries, don't blame China and "bad trade deals." Blame...
From ACM Opinion
The Sublime and Scary Future of Cameras With A.I. Brains
Something strange, scary and sublime is happening to cameras, and it's going to complicate everything you knew about pictures. Cameras are getting brains.
From ACM Opinion
Bioengineers Today Emphasize the Crucial Ingredient Dr. Frankenstein Forgot: Responsibility
Mary Shelley was 20 when she published "Frankenstein" in 1818. Two hundred years on, the book remains thrilling, challenging and relevant—especially for scientists...
From ACM Opinion
Computing With Random Pulses Promises to Simplify Circuitry and Save Power
In electronics, the past halfcentury has been a steady march away from analog and toward digital. Telephony, music recording and playback, cameras, and radio and...
From ACM Opinion
Retweets Are Trash
A couple of months ago, I made a small tweak to my Twitter account that has changed my experience of the platform.
From ACM Opinion
A Framework for Building Artificial Intelligence Capabilities
After decades of promise and hype, artificial intelligence has finally reached a tipping point of market acceptance.
From ACM News
Has Dopamine Got s Hooked on Tech?
In an unprecedented attack of candour, Sean Parker, the 38-year-old founding president of Facebook, recently admitted that the social network was founded not to...
From ACM Opinion
In S v. Microsoft, a Decades-Old Law Leaves Few Good Options
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in United States v. Microsoft, a case that many observers believe could have significant ramifications for how...
From ACM Opinion
The Limits of Explainability
When we look at a stack of blocks or a stack of Oreos, we intuitively have a sense of how stable it is, whether it might fall over, and in what direction it may...
From ACM Opinion
Tech Companies Should Stop Pretending AI Won't Destroy Jobs
I took an Uber to an artificial-intelligence conference at MIT one recent morning, and the driver asked me how long it would take for autonomous vehicles to take...
From ACM Opinion
Where the 'Crisis Actor' Conspiracy Theory Comes From
The term "crisis actor" has been in the news a lot lately, because conspiracy theorists have accused survivors of the Douglas High School mass shooting in Parkland...
From ACM Opinion
How Trump Conquered Facebook, Without Russian Ads
It's not every day that a former work colleague gets retweeted by the president of the United States.
From ACM Opinion
Cryptocurrency: The Hail Mary Pass for People Who Missed the Tech Boom
Between mid-December and early February, bitcoin lost more than half its value, dropping from a high of nearly twenty thousand dollars to just below seven thousand...
From ACM Opinion
Russia's Troll Operation Was Not That Sophisticated
It might be nice for Democrats and #NeverTrumpers to believe that Russia's troll factory brought Donald Trump the 2016 Presidential Election.
From ACM Opinion
How to Monitor Fake News
The indictment of 13 Russians filed on Friday by Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election,...
From ACM Opinion
How Russia Turned the Internet Against America
The indictment released Friday by special counsel Robert Mueller makes plain how prosecutors believe Russia pursued its multiyear scheme to undermine the 2016 presidential...
From ACM News
2 Years After FBI vs. Apple, Encryption Debate Remains
It's been two years since the FBI and Apple got into a giant fight over encryption following the San Bernardino shooting, when the government had the shooter's...
From ACM Opinion
China's Dystopian Tech Could Be Contagious
For all the particularities of life in China, its big cities offer a familiar cosmopolitanism.
From ACM Opinion
19th-Century Paleontology Was at the Forefront of Big Data
In 1981, when I was 9 years old, my father took me to see Raiders of the Lost Ark.
From ACM Opinion