Communications of the ACM
The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
April 2016
From ACM Opinion
The Senate's Draft Encryption Bill Is 'ludicrous, Dangerous, Technically Illiterate'
As Apple Battled the FBI for the last two months over the agency's demands that Apple help crack its own encryption, both the tech community and law enforcement hoped that Congress would weigh in with some sort of compromise…
From ACM Opinion
The Man Selling Shovels in the Machine-Learning Gold Rush
Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of the chipmaker Nvidia, is either very prescient or very lucky.
From ACM Opinion
When Is the Singularity? Probably Not in Your Lifetime
Misconception: Computers will outstrip human capabilities within many of our lifetimes.
From ACM Opinion
Technology Gone Wild
Birding — the amateur pursuit of watching and monitoring bird populations — is a big deal. The numbers back it up.
From ACM Opinion
What If Apple Is Wrong?
Soon after Devon Godfrey was shot to death in his apartment in Harlem on the evening of April 12, 2010, officers with the New York Police Department thought they knew who did it.
From ACM Opinion
Lessons from Apple vs. the F.b.i.
It's welcome news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has dropped its legal effort to force Apple to help it create a method of accessing data on a locked iPhone 5C used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the perpetrators ofSan…
From ACM Opinion
To Beat Go Champion, Google's Program Needed a Human Army
Nearly 20 years ago, after a chess-playing computer called Deep Blue beat the world grandmaster Garry Kasparov, I wrote an article about why humans would long remain the champions in the game of Go.
From ACM Opinion
Is Alphago Really Such a Big Deal?
In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue system defeated the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov.
From ACM Opinion
Mind Craft
Concerned because you can't pry your daughter away from Minecraft? Worried that your son spends every moment obsessing over moves in the super-popular video game?
From Communications of the ACM
The Internet and Inequality
Is universal access to the Internet a realistic method for addressing worldwide socioeconomic inequality?
From Communications of the ACM
The Need For Corporate Diplomacy
Whether global companies succeed or fail often depends on how effectively they develop and maintain cooperative relationships with other organizations and governments.
From Communications of the ACM
Beyond Viral
The proliferation of social media usage has not resulted in significant social change.
From Communications of the ACM
GNL Is Not Linux
What's in a name?