Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
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
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
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
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
How the Battle For the Future of the Web Is Shaped By Economics
There are two stories people are trying to tell right now about the future of the Internet.
From ACM Opinion
Moore's Law Turns 50
On April 19, 1965, just over 50 years ago, Gordon Moore, then the head of research for Fairchild Semiconductor and later one of the co-founders of Intel, was asked...
From ACM Opinion
New Ways to Crash the Market
Five years ago, on the afternoon of May 6, 2010, the Dow and the S. & P. fell more than six per cent in a matter of minutes, losing a trillion dollars in value.
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
Why Nsa Surveillance Is Worse Than You've Ever Imagined
Last summer, after months of encrypted emails, I spent three days in Moscow hanging out with Edward Snowden for a Wired cover story.
From ACM Opinion
Why the Ruling Against the Nsa's Phone Records Program Could Have Huge Implications
A federal appeals court ruling that the National Security Agency's collection of millions of Americans' phone records is illegal could undercut more than just that...
From ACM Opinion
The Illegal Phone-Data Sweeps
There is a lot to praise in the powerful ruling issued by a three-judge federal appeals panel in New York on Thursday, which held that the government's vast, continuing...
From ACM Opinion