Communications of the ACM
The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2020
From ACM Opinion
Eric Schmidt: I Used to Run Google. Silicon Valley Could Lose to China.
We can't win the technology wars without the federal government's help.
From ACM Opinion
How to Know if Artificial Intelligence is About to Destroy Civilization
These canaries in the coal mines of AI would be signs that superintelligent robot overlords are approaching.
From ACM Opinion
Should Government Halt the Use of Facial-Recognition Technology?
Critics say false positives are far higher for some groups of people than for others, but supporters of the technology says the actual numbers involved are tiny.
From ACM Opinion
Defeated Chess Champ Garry Kasparov Has Made Peace With AI
Twenty-three years after his loss to IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer, Garry Kasparov says people need to work with machines.
From ACM Opinion
The U.S. Needs a High-Tech Manhattan Project
The United States needs to wrest the high-tech initiative from China and re-establish American dominance in telecommunications, computation, artificial intelligence, and other key fields.
From ACM Opinion
Why We Can't Develop Voting Software That Works
Ever wonder why we could write software to get to the Moon, but not to count votes? Here are five reasons.
From ACM Opinion
We Need to Talk About 'Cloud Neutrality'
Given how critical the cloud has become for a huge swath of the tech economy, maybe we should ask ourselves whether this infrastructure should be in the hands of a few trillion-dollar companies.
From ACM Opinion
Challenging the Myth of the 10x Programmer
A pervasive belief in software engineering is that some programmers are much better than others, and that their skills, abilities, and talents exert an outsized influence on an organization's success or failure. Data from a study…
From ACM Opinion
Towards a Conversational Agent that Can Chat About…Anything
In "Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot", we present Meena, a 2.6-billion-parameter end-to-end trained neural conversational model.
From ACM Opinion
Why Connected Cars May Never Come
John Paré tells the story of his first trip in an autonomous vehicle.
From Communications of the ACM
Are We Losing Momentum?
Estimating when the second half of the world will come online.
From Communications of the ACM
Are You Sure Your Software Will Not Kill Anyone?
Using software to control potentially unsafe systems requires the use of new software and system engineering approaches.
From Communications of the ACM
Numbers Are for Computers, Strings Are for Humans
How and where software should translate data into a human-readable form.
From Communications of the ACM
When Human-Computer Interaction Meets Community Citizen Science
Empowering communities through citizen science.
From Communications of the ACM
Guiding Students to Develop Essential Skills
Students should interact with one another to practice skills and construct their own understanding, with assistance from a teacher acting as a coach and guide — not a lecturer.