Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
Driverless Cars Made Me Nervous. Then I Tried One.
On my fourth day in a semi-driverless car, I finally felt comfortable enough to let it stop itself.
From ACM Opinion
Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges--The Aliens Are All Asleep
Anders Sandberg and Stuart Armstrong of the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, working with Milan Ćirković of the University of Novi Sad in Serbia...
From ACM Opinion
The Supreme Court Is Allergic to Math
The Supreme Court does not compute. Or at least some of its members would rather not. The justices, the most powerful jurists in the land, seem to have a reluctance—even...
From ACM Opinion
Will AI and Blockchain Be Game-Changers?
This week saw another major achievement by Google's Deep Mind, when it showed that a neural network could learn to play Go in just three days, without even looking...
From ACM Opinion
Andrew Ng Has a Chatbot That Can Help with Depression
I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, but I've been seeing a virtual therapist.
From ACM Opinion
The 15 Most Influential Websites of All Time
The web, or "world wide web" as we used to say, turns 27 years old on December 20. On that date, nearly three decades ago, British engineer and scientist Tim Berners...
From ACM Opinion
Kitchen of the Future: Smart and Fast but Not Much Fun
Wandering among the engineers and strategy directors and managers of something called "connected customer experience" at the Smart Kitchen Summit, one had to wonder...
From ACM Opinion
Provoking Iran Could Have nseen Cyber Consequences
On Friday, President Trump announced that he will not certify Iran's cooperation with the 2015 nuclear agreement negotiated by the Obama Administration.
From ACM Opinion
Would You Buy a Self-Driving Future From These Guys?
When the owner of an automated Tesla was killed in a crash last year, the carmaker's founder, Elon Musk, urged journalists to peer into the future.
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Dna Sequencing
Forty years ago, two papers1, 2 described the first tractable methods for determining the order of the chemical bases in stretches of DNA. Before these 1977 publications...
From ACM Opinion
The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions
We are surrounded by hysteria about the future of artificial intelligence and robotics—hysteria about how powerful they will become, how quickly, and what they...
From ACM Opinion
What Facebook Did to American Democracy
In the media world, as in so many other realms, there is a sharp discontinuity in the timeline: before the 2016 election, and after.
From ACM Opinion
Is Your Bank Data Yours?
Who owns the information in your bank account? Transactions, balance history, every other detail?
From ACM Opinion
China's AI Awakening
On a tropical island that marks the southern tip of China, a computer program called Lengpudashi is playing one-on-one poker against a dozen people at once, and...
From ACM Opinion
Why Is There No Nobel Prize in Technology?
As the world focuses its attention on this year's recipients of the planet's most prestigious prize, the Nobel, it feels like something's missing from the list:...
From ACM Opinion
How the Chinese Cyberthreat Has evolved
With more than half of its 1.4 billion people online, the world's most populous country is home to a slew of cyberspies and hackers.
From ACM Opinion
Let's se the Government's Massive Databases to Make Better Policy
Members of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking appear before Congress this week to present their final report (pdf).
From ACM Opinion
Misinformation Is the New Normal of Mass Shootings
On the morning after the deadliest shooting in modern American history, there was a certain predictability in the response to a tragedy that left at least 59 dead...
From ACM Opinion
Trump Is Making Canada Great Again
It's no secret that the United States has long dominated cutting-edge technologies, from personal computers and biotech to smartphones and social media.
From ACM Opinion