Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
What Apple's Tim Cook Overlooked in His Defense of Privacy
Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive, delivered a speech last week that raised some eyebrows in the technology industry.
From ACM Opinion
Will We Ever… Speak Faster Than Light Speed?
Light travels so fast it can make the transatlantic journey between London and New York more than 50 times each second. With speed like that, you might wonder why...
From ACM Opinion
The Pluto Punch-Through
On July 14, 2015 NASA's New Horizons spacecraft finally reaches Pluto. But the encounter is brief.
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
The Myth of a Borderless Internet
Almost a decade ago now, McDonald's made a seemingly innocuous decision.
From ACM Opinion
It's Time to Let Edward Snowden Come Home
Now that Congress has passed, and President Obama has signed, the U.S.A. Freedom Act, which places some limits on the domestic-surveillance powers of the National...
From ACM Opinion
The Real Winners in the Fight Over Government Surveillance
After the Senate passed legislation aimed at reforming a program that collected data about the phone calls of millions of Americans, Senate Majority Leader Mitch...
From ACM Opinion
I Made an ntraceable 'ghost Gun' in My Office—and It Was Easy
This is my ghost gun. To quote the rifleman's creed, there are many like it, but this one is mine.
From ACM Opinion
Want Your Writing to Look Like Einstein's? Computers Mimic Handwriting of the Famous
Harald Geisler wants to make you as brilliant as Albert Einstein. Or at least let you write like him. Or at least write in his handwriting.
From ACM Opinion
The Military Origins of Wearable Tech, a Century Before the Apple Watch
On July 9, 1916, The New York Times puzzled over a fashion trend: Europeans were starting to wear bracelets with clocks on them.
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
Looking For Creativity in Brains Will Take More Creativity
About a decade and a half ago, the neuroscience world got super-stoked about a sexy new way to look at living brains: functional magnetic resonance imaging.
From ACM Opinion
A Murky Road Ahead For Android, Despite Market Dominance
In 2005, Google bought a tiny mobile software company named Android, and almost nobody in the technology industry saw its potential—not even Eric Schmidt, Google's...
From ACM Opinion
Project Exodus
On March 27th, an American astronaut named Scott Kelly blasted off from Earth and, six hours later, clambered onto the International Space Station.
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 ACM Opinion
As Congress Haggles Over Patriot Act, We Answer 6 Basic Questions
The rest of the month is setting up to be pretty dramatic in the Senate.
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
The Second Job You Don’t Know You Have
Technology has knocked the bottom rung out of the employment ladder, which has sent youth unemployment around the globe skyrocketing and presented us with a serious...
From ACM Opinion