Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
The Singularity Is Not Near: The Intellectual Fraud of the 'Singularitarians'
Technology was identified as the true official religion of the modern state more than seventy years ago by the late Christian anarchist philosopher Jacques Ellul...
From ACM Opinion
The Next Big Discovery in Astronomy? Scientists Probably Found It Years Ago, But They Don't Know It Yet
Earlier this year, astronomers stumbled upon a fascinating finding: Thousands of black holes likely exist near the center of our galaxy.
From ACM Opinion
Facial Recognition Tech Is Creepy When It Works, And Creepier When It Doesn't
For the last few years, police forces around China have invested heavily to build the world's largest video surveillance and facial recognition system, incorporating...
From ACM Opinion
Free Will, Video Games, and the Most Profound Quantum Mystery
The word "predictable" first entered the English language two centuries ago.
From ACM Opinion
'2001: A Space Odyssey' Is Still the 'ltimate Trip'
In the spring of 1964 the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was very worried. NASA was about to fly the Mariner 4 space probe past Mars.
From ACM Opinion
Richard Feynman at 100
A pre-eminent twentieth-century physicist and a Nobel laureate: Richard Feynman was certainly those. He was also much more.
From ACM Opinion
Google's Duplex Could Make Assistant the Most Lifelike AI Yet
The conversation seems mundane. At least, at first.
From ACM Opinion
How Frightened Should We Be of A.I.?
Precisely how and when will our curiosity kill us?
From ACM Opinion
One Space Between Each Sentence, They Said. Science Just Proved Them Wrong.
In the beginning, the rules of the space bar were simple. Two spaces after each period. Every time. Easy.
From ACM Opinion
Chinese-American Elites Lament a Brewing Trade War
It's not easy to promote closer US-China ties these days.
From ACM Opinion
Why Silicon Valley Must Go to War
Should technologists prevent their tools from being used to wage war? This question was answered with a furious yes at Google recently, when more than 3,000 employees ...
From ACM Opinion
AI Can Help Cybersecurity, If It Can Fight Through the Hype
Walking the enormous exhibition halls at the recent RSA security conference in San Francisco, you could have easily gotten the impression that digital defense was...
From ACM Opinion
Nazis Pressed Ham Radio Hobbyists to Serve the Third Reich, but Surviving Came at a Price
When people have free and unfettered choices of activities, they both entertain and express themselves through their pastimes—whether stamp or coin collecting,...
From ACM Opinion
Forging Voices and Faces: The Dangers of Audio and Video Fabrication
In 1963, before he could give the speech he'd prepared for his trip to Dallas, U.S. president John F. Kennedy was assassinated. In March 2018, a company re-created...
From ACM Opinion
The Facebook Controversy: Privacy Is Not the Issue
Cambridge Analytica's wholesale scraping of Facebook user data is familiar news by now, and we are all "shocked" that personal data are being shared and traded...
From ACM Opinion
Autonomous Weapons Would Take Warfare to a New Domain, Without Humans
Killer robots have been a staple of TV and movies for decades, from Westworld to The Terminator series. But in the real world, killer robots are officially known...
From ACM Opinion
When John Doerr Brought a 'Gift' to Google's Founders
On a fall day in 1999, in the heart of Silicon Valley, I arrived at a two-story, L-shaped structure off the 101 freeway. It was young Google's headquarters, and...
From Communications of the ACM
The March Into the Black Hole of Complexity
Addressing the root causes of rapidly increasing software complexity.
From ACM Opinion
The Illusion of Time
According to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: our naive perception of its flow doesn't correspond to physical reality.
From ACM Opinion