Communications of the ACM
The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
December 2014
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 learning software that can gain abilities from experience.
From ACM News
This Year's 8 Smartest i Design Ideas
When your family gathered for the holidays this year, did you take note of the technology everyone was using?
From ACM Opinion
A Q&a With the Hackers Who Say They Helped Break Into Sony's Network
Lizard Squad. That's the hacker group whose name is suddenly on everyone's lips after it took credit for ruining Christmas for PlayStation and Xbox gamers everywhere.
From ACM Opinion
Do Aliens Know It's Christmas?
A star appeared in the East.
From ACM Opinion
Are These the Five Craziest Space Missions?
The landing of the Philae Lander—on a comet travelling at 135,000km/h (84,000mph)—has been hailed as the start of a new chapter in space exploration.
From ACM Opinion
The Best Science Visualizations of the Year
Here at Wired Science, we're big fans of science graphics. And not just the fancy, big-budget ones, but charts and figures and visualizations: the folk art of scientific imagery.
From ACM Opinion
North Korea and Cyberterrorists Won Big in Sony Hack, Researcher Says
It looks like the great cyber-war with North Korea has begun, at least by proxy.
From ACM Opinion
Fear Artificial Stupidity, Not Artificial Intelligence
It is not often that you are obliged to proclaim a much-loved genius wrong, but in his alarming prediction on artificial intelligence and the future of humankind, I believe Stephen Hawking has erred. To be precise, and in keeping…
From ACM Opinion
Comet Breakthrough of the Year + People's Choice
This year's breakthrough captured the public's imagination with a series of hard-won pictures, beamed to Earth from a place beyond Mars.
From ACM Opinion
Sony Made It Easy, but Any of S Could Get Hacked
Earlier this month, a mysterious group that calls itself Guardians of Peace hacked into Sony Pictures Entertainment’s computer systems and began revealing many of the Hollywood studio’s best-kept secrets, from details about unreleased…
From ACM Opinion
The Lesson of the Sony Hack: We Should All Jump to the 'erasable Internet'
This month's news provides yet another occasion for a friendly public-service reminder to anyone who uses a digital device to say anything to anyone, ever.
From ACM Opinion
The Sony Hackers Are Terrorists
The Sony Pictures hack is important, and the Sony Pictures hack is terrifying.
From ACM Opinion
How to Conquer the Galaxy on a Computer
Space is big. Really big. And not just in terms of the mind-boggingly vast distances between the stars and planets out there in the Universe at large.
From ACM Opinion
From Pc to Navy, Ars Pits Casual Flight Sim Skills Against a Real Cockpit Trainer
A little over a year ago, I was lucky enough to take a short ride in a Folland Gnat trainer—a nimble little two-seat jet maintained by Rick Sharpe of Houston's Vietnam War Flight Museum.
From ACM Opinion
William Gibson Sees the Future
"The thing to keep in mind," William Gibson tells me when we meet in the quiet lounge of a Victorian-style hotel in Chicago, "is that I’m not actually predicting the future. I'm generating scenarios."
From ACM Opinion
The Future of .s. Innovation Might Rest on This Obscure Patent Lawsuit
Patent trolls: They're a huge suck on the economy, eating up untold millions in legal fees and deliberately suing innocent companies just because they're flush with cash.
From ACM Opinion
Dumbing It Down in the Cockpit
Long gone are the leather jackets, goggles, and silk scarves flung over the shoulders of aviators who wrestled with flight controls, furiously scanned instruments, and navigated using paper charts.
From ACM Opinion
Forget Turing—i Want to Test Computer Creativity
What are the elements of the Turing test?
From ACM Opinion
What Are Moocs Good For?
A few years ago, the most enthusiastic advocates of MOOCs believed that these "massive open online courses" stood poised to overturn the century-old model of higher education.
From ACM Opinion
Artificial Intelligence Isn't a Threat—Yet
Does artificial intelligence threaten our species, as the cosmologist Stephen Hawking recently suggested?
From ACM Opinion
Boston Researcher Cynthia Breazeal Is Ready to Bring Robots Into the Home. Are You?
The MIT Media Lab's Personal Robots Group flanks the soaring atrium on the fourth floor of the Wiesner Building, a wall of metal panels along the southern edge of Cambridge, Mass.
From ACM Opinion
We Might Be Able to 3-D-Print an Artificial Mind One Day
I'm an artificial-intelligence skeptic.
From ACM Opinion
Why We Need a Federal Agency on Robotics
The robots are no longer coming; they are here. And the law's response has been lacking. What is the best approach for integrating this transformative technology? We need a federal agency to help figure it out.
From ACM Opinion
Father of Web Tells Russia's Putin: Internet Is Not a 'cia Project'
The inventor of the World Wide Web said on Thursday that Russian President Vladimir Putin was incorrect when he alleged the Internet was a project created by U.S. spies in the Central Intelligence Agency.
From ACM Opinion
Get Your Head Around the 13 Boldest Ideas in Science
Science is full of mind-blowing and counterintuitive concepts.
From ACM Opinion
It's Time to Intelligently Discuss Artificial Intelligence
Tesla CEO Elon Musk worries it is "potentially more dangerous than nukes."
From ACM Opinion
Tech's Lost Chapter: An Oral History of Boston's Rise and Fall
In the popular telling, the dawn of personal computing begins in the summer of 1976, when Steve Wozniak showed off the Apple I at a meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley.
From ACM Opinion
Ransomware Is the Future of Consumer Cybercrime
It's 2020, bitter cold outside, you’re running late for work, and the Linux box that controls your car isn't going to start unless you wire $20 worth of Bitcoin to an increasingly business-like criminal enterprise operating out…
From ACM Opinion
Looking to Mars to Help Understand Changing Climates
Where now it stands the Plain of Gold did once my river flow.
From ACM Opinion
Baer's Odyssey: Meet the Serial Inventor Who Built the World's First Game Console
Even if you're a devoted fan of video games, there's a decent chance you're not familiar with the name Ralph H. Baer.