Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
Robot Servants Are Going to Make Your Life Easy. Then They'll Ruin It
Jibo, the "world's first family robot," hit the media hype machine like a bomb.
From ACM Opinion
The Hazards of Going on Autopilot
At 9:18 P.M. on February 12, 2009, Continental Connection Flight 3407, operated by Colgan Air, took off from Newark International Airport.
From ACM Careers
The Coming Age of the Internet Naturalist
Three years ago, Shaun Winterton was looking at photos of bugs on Flickr.
From ACM Opinion
The Case For Kill Switches in Military Weaponry
This summer the insurgent group ISIS captured the Iraqi city of Mosul—and along with it, three army divisions' worth of U.S.-supplied equipment from the Iraqi army...
From ACM Opinion
Why Internet Governance Should Be Left to the Engineers
As the Internet and the disruptive innovations it spawns are becoming economically, politically, and culturally vital for the world’s three billion users (and counting)...
From ACM Opinion
Satellites: Make Earth Observations Open Access
Changes in land cover affect the global climate by absorbing and reflecting solar radiation, and by altering fluxes of heat, water vapour, carbon dioxide and other...
From ACM Opinion
John Walker, the Navy Spy Who Defined Crypto-Betrayal, Dead at 77
This week, the man responsible for what is probably the biggest cryptographic failure in military history died—just a few months before he was due to be released...
From ACM Opinion
Singularity or Transhumanism: What Word Should We se to Discuss the Future?
Singularity. Posthuman. Techno-Optimism, Cyborgism. Humanity+. Immortalist. Machine intelligence. Biohacker. Robotopia. Life extension. Transhumanism.
From ACM Opinion
The History Inside S
Every day our DNA breaks a little. Special enzymes keep our genome intact while we're alive, but after death, once the oxygen runs out, there is no more repair.
From ACM Opinion
Why Big Data Has Some Big Problems When It Comes to Public Policy
For all the talk about using big data and data science to solve the world’s problems—and even all the talk about big data as one of the world’s problems—it seems...
From ACM Opinion
In Praise of Efficient Price Gouging
In the four years since the car service Uber launched, it has been beset by criticism from myriad groups, including city officials annoyed by its sometimes cavalier...
From ACM Opinion
A nified Theory
For the last half-century we've had a popular notion that our intellectual culture is sundered in two—the literary and the scientific.
From ACM Opinion
How to Save the Net: Keep It Open
For all of its history, the Internet has enjoyed the fruits of an openness principle: the idea that anyone can reach any site online and that information and data...
From ACM Opinion
Anatomy of an Air Strike: Three Intelligence Streams Working in Concert
In a fast-moving war with an elusive foe like the Islamic State militants, information is as important as guns, jet fighters and bombs.
From ACM Opinion
Police Cameras Can Shed Light, but Raise Privacy Concerns
Michael Brown, the unarmed teenager who was shot during an encounter with police in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 9, was recorded by a convenience store surveillance camera...
From ACM Opinion
Beyond Classic Brain Illustrations That Make S Drool
I threw down a bit of a challenge last month at the Association of Medical Illustrators Conference in Minnesota.
From ACM Opinion
Artificial Intelligence Will Not Turn Into a Frankenstein's Monster
The singularity—or, to give it its proper title, the technological singularity. It's an idea that has taken on a life of its own; more of a life, I suspect, than...
From ACM Opinion
I Liked Everything I Saw on Facebook For Two Days. Here's What It Did to Me
There's this great Andy Warhol quote you’ve probably seen before: "I think everybody should like everybody."
From ACM Opinion
How Wwi Codebreakers Taught Your Gas Meter to Snitch on You
In the depths of night on August 5th 1914 the British Cable Ship Alert took the first significant action of World War I, severing the five German submarine cables...
From ACM Opinion