Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
Toolkits For the Mind
When the Japanese computer scientist Yukihiro Matsumoto decided to create Ruby, a programming language that has helped build Twitter, Hulu, and much of the modern...
From ACM Opinion
Reality Check: Comparing Hololens and Magic Leap
I've seen two competing visions for a future in which virtual objects are merged seamlessly with the real world.
From ACM Opinion
Our Fear of Artificial Intelligence
Years ago I had coffee with a friend who ran a startup.
From ACM News
2014 in Computing: Breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence
The holy grail of artificial intelligence—creating software that comes close to mimicking human intelligence—remains far off. But 2014 saw major strides in machine...
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
Imposing Security
Three computer bugs this year exposed passwords, e-mails, financial data, and other kinds of sensitive information connected to potentially billions of people.
From ACM Opinion
Diagnosis For Healthcare.gov: nrealistic Technology Expectations
The fiasco with the $600 million federal health insurance website wasn't all bureaucratic.
From ACM Opinion
Driverless Cars Are Further Away Than You Think
A silver BMW 5 Series is weaving through traffic at roughly 120 kilometers per hour (75 mph) on a freeway that cuts northeast through Bavaria between Munich and...
From ACM Opinion
Cryptographers Have an Ethics Problem
Last week, I visited the MIT computer science department looking for a very famous cryptographer.
From ACM Opinion
Windows 8: Design Over sability
Windows 8 is a computer science masterpiece trapped inside a user interface kerfuffle.
From ACM Opinion
Why China's Homemade Microchips Will Struggle to Displace Western Giants
If China's ultimate aim in the sphere of technology is to become completely self-sufficient, it is well on the way to achieving this ambitious goal.
From ACM Opinion
By Hiring Kurzweil, Google Just Killed the Singularity
Late last Friday, Google announced a jaw-dropping hire: Ray Kurzweil will join the company as a Director of Engineering. Has the world’s brainiest tech company"rapture...
From ACM Opinion
What Sinofsky's Departure Suggests About the Current State, and Likely Future, of Microsoft
Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft's Windows division, abruptly left the company on November 12, shortly after introducing the latest version of the company's...
From ACM Opinion
Review: Raspberry Pi
You can get a lot for $35 these days. It bought me what looks like a credit card-size James Bond gadget prototype but is actually a fully functional computer.
From ACM Opinion
Why Only Designers Can Create New Programming Languages
Compared to the versions that are hacked together late at night under insane deadline pressure, the programming languages to come out of academia are failures.
From ACM Opinion
The Year in Computing
2011 saw the personal computer continue to be marginalized. Although PCs are still the workhorse computing device in homes and offices, the most exciting innovations...
From ACM Opinion
The Singularity Isn't Near
Futurists like Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil have argued that the world is rapidly approaching a tipping point, where the accelerating pace of smarter and smarter...
From ACM Opinion