Communications of the ACM
The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
November 2021
From ACM Opinion
The U.S. Needs a Department of Tech and Science Policy
Two former NIH directors call for a cabinet-level department to formulate science policy, oversee tech development
From ACM Opinion
Be Wary of Trusting Algorithms in Volatile Markets
IT leaders can prevent disaster by understanding and articulating the risks of relying on increasingly complex algorithms
From ACM Opinion
The Inherent Limitations of GPT-3
Why GPT-3 as is will not cost many people their jobs or soon lead to AGI
From ACM Opinion
A Fix-It Job for Government Tech
To build trust in the government, it would help if the website worked
From ACM Opinion
Stop the Blame Game to Achieve Research Integrity
Helping every scientist to improve is more effective than ferreting out a few frauds
From ACM Opinion
How to Fix Facebook
Twelve leading experts share bold solutions to the company's urgent problems
From ACM Opinion
AI Reality Check
The limitations in getting machines to understand a world they don't live in
From ACM Opinion
China's AI Dream and the AI 'Arms Race'
Stanford postdoctoral fellow discusses research exploring impact of AI in a possible U.S.-China power transition
From ACM Opinion
An Insider's View of 'Algorithmic Warfare'
Artificial intelligence will change the nature of war, says a former U.S. deputy secretary of defense.
From ACM Opinion
AI Needs to Prevent Cyberattacks, Not Just Detect Them
AI should be enabling faster, automated, more ubiquitous prevention of cyberattacks
From ACM Opinion
Let Crypto Regulate Itself
What's needed is a self-regulatory organization for digital assets to promote ethical trading and governance
From ACM Opinion
Self-Supervised Learning and Large Language Models
Stanford PhD student discusses recent research on understanding, building, and controlling pre-trained models
From ACM Opinion
AI Is Not A-OK
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt says humans will need to find a way to coexist with artificial intelligence
From ACM Opinion
Henry Kissinger's Last Crusade: Stopping Dangerous AI
Former secretary of state has a whole new area of interest: artificial intelligence
From ACM Opinion
Imagining AI's Potential for Good
Kai-Fu Lee and Yoky Matsuoka discuss "human-in-the-loop" technology, and how AI might be used for health and caregiving
From ACM Opinion
New York, Miami, and the Future of Crypto Cities
Cities and the crypto community can gain a lot from a closer relationship
From ACM Opinion
The Turing Test Is Bad for Business
Technology should focus on the complementarity game, not the imitation game
From ACM Opinion
The Chip That Could Transform Computing
Apple's new M1 processors are generating loads of power...and excitement
From ACM Opinion
Teens and Social Media: The Question We're Not Asking
Should they be using these services at all?
From ACM Opinion
Artificial Intelligence Needs to Slow Down
Timnit Gebru believes the incentives around AI research are all wrong
From ACM Opinion
AI and the Intelligence Community: The Tangled Web of Budget and Acquisition
The intelligence community still faces basic hurdles as it moves to transition and integrate AI at speed and scale
From ACM Opinion
'Yeah, We're Spooked', Says Expert about AI's Potential Impact
Professor Stuart Russell says field of AI needs to grow up quickly to ensure humans remain in control
From ACM Opinion
Why We Forgive Humans More Readily Than Machines
When things go wrong, flexible moral intuitions cause us to judge computers more severely
From ACM Opinion
Social Media Cos. Help African Governments Abuse 'Disinformation Laws'
Social media platforms alternate between ignoring disinformation and launching broad crackdowns on user speech
From ACM Opinion
Meta's Andrew Bosworth on Moving Facebook to the Metaverse
'The magnitude of technological shifts that we are trying to manifest here hasn't been attempted in a long time'
From ACM Opinion
RL Benchmarking, Climate Impacts of AI, and AI for Law
Stanford JD-PhD candidate Peter Henderson talks about creating robust decision-making systems and ML methods that benefit society
From ACM Opinion
Complexity Is Killing Software Developers
How to regain control, without losing out on the best these technologies have to offer
From ACM Opinion
The Metaverse Is Simply Big Tech, but Bigger
It's a rebrand of Silicon Valley's increasing power and reach, and it's made for companies, not people
From ACM Opinion
Anne Carpenter: Her Machine Learning Tools Pull Insights from Cell Images
Computational biologist brings the power of machine learning to researchers seeking answers in mountains of cell images
From ACM Opinion
Strong AI Requires Autonomous Building of Composable Models
Models built by AI must encode the fundamental patterns of experience