Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
Beware the Listening Machines
One of my great pleasures in life is attending conferences on fields I'm intrigued by, but know nothing about.
From ACM News
Who Will Own the Robots?
The way Hod Lipson describes his Creative Machines Lab captures his ambitions: "We are interested in robots that create and are creative."
From ACM Opinion
No One Questions Google's Ability to Innovate, So Why Do Its Moonshots Look Like Money Pits?
Consider a question that we have been puzzling over at the World Economic Forum.
From ACM Opinion
Stop Laughing at Those Clumsy Humanoid Robots
The humanoid robot, built like a linebacker with an oversized head, tiptoes on two feet through the dirt.
From ACM Opinion
Why Robots and Humans Struggled with Darpa's Challenge
When some of the world's most advanced rescue robots are foiled by nothing more complex than a doorknob, you get a good sense of the challenge of making our homes...
From ACM Opinion
Lust and the Turing Test
By and large, we watch movies to be entertained, not to be provoked into deep thought. Occasionally, a film does both.
From ACM Opinion
Immortal But Damned to Hell on Earth
Imagine a supercomputer so advanced that it could hold the contents of a human brain.
From ACM Opinion
An Npr Reporter Raced a Machine to Write a News Story. Who Won?
Even the most creative jobs have parts that are pretty routine—tasks that, at least in theory, can be done by a machine. Take, for example, being a reporter.
From Communications of the ACM
Created Computed Universe
Computing crosses cosmology and makes the case for agnosticism.
From ACM Opinion
Why Robots Will Always Need S
"Human beings are ashamed to have been born instead of made," wrote the philosopher Günther Anders in 1956. Our shame has only deepened as our machines have grown...
From ACM Opinion
Hacking the Brain
The perfectibility of the human mind is a theme that has captured our imagination for centuries—the notion that, with the right tools, the right approach, the right...
From ACM Opinion
5 Ways We Must Regulate Drones at the .s. Border
Border patrol agents have Predator drones at their disposal, and using them has the potential to become a serious breach of privacy — but it also could be a terrific...
From ACM Opinion
'rise of the Robots' and 'shadow Work'
In the late 20th century, while the blue-collar working class gave way to the forces of globalization and automation, the educated elite looked on with benign condescension...
From ACM Opinion
Are We to Become Gods, the Destroyers of Our World?
In the stylish new sci-fi thriller Ex Machina, Frankenstein's old theme re-emerges in a beautifully designed setting: Instead of the Gothic castle we have a spectacular...
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Sex: It Gets Better
When I was 10 years old, my friend Sarah and I found a newly minted copy of "The Joy of Sex" under her parents' bed.
From ACM Opinion
Meet the Bots
The day that science fiction writers have feared for so long has finally come—the machines have risen up.
From ACM Opinion
Karen, an App That Knows You All Too Well
Thinking about a life coach but not ready to commit to the real thing?
From ACM Opinion
Germanwings Flight 9525, Technology, and the Question of Trust
Shortly before the dreadful crash of Germanwings Flight 9525, I happened to be reading part of "The Second Machine Age," a book by two academics at M.I.T., Erik...
From ACM Opinion
Mathematicians of the Future?
Herbert Simon, the Nobel-prize winning economist, was a techno-enthusiast. In 1956 he predicted that, "within 10 years, computers would beat the world chess champion...
From ACM Opinion