Communications of the ACM
The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
December 2021
From ACM Opinion
Save Social Media by Treating It like a City
Make online spaces more similar to offline ones to limit the reach of bad actors and keep people safe
From ACM Opinion
Does AI Understand Our Language?
Can large language models teach us about the nature of language, understanding, intelligence, sociality, and personhood?
From ACM Opinion
The Benefits of Rust
An in-depth discussion about the virtue of Rust, its future, and more
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Robot Nannies
A machine can't love our children, but our children might love them
From ACM Opinion
2021 Was the Year of Monster AI Models
GPT-3 kicked off a new trend in AI for bigger and bigger models, but how large will they get?
From ACM Opinion
What Does the Data Say about the Current State of K-12 STEM Education in the U.S.?
A conversation with Julia Phillips of the National Science Board on the state of elementary and secondary STEM education in the nation.
From ACM Opinion
Why It's Too Early to Get Excited About Web3
Idealism surrounding the Web3 vision is great, but we’ve been there before
From ACM Opinion
What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?
It's simple enough for AI to seem to comprehend data, but devising a true test of a machine's knowledge has proved difficult
From ACM Opinion
AWS Is Too Big to Fail
Quite simply, AWS is too big and has too many customers for the good of society
From ACM Opinion
Caution Ahead: Navigating Risks to Freedoms Posed by AI
Applications of AI could pierce through boundaries that safeguard our rights and liberties
From ACM Opinion
Log4j Vulnerability: Why Your Hot Take on It Is Wrong
Log4j vulnerability is too complex to be boiled down to just single cause
From ACM Opinion
Who Killed the Robot Dog?
The robotic companion was once a dream of techno-utopianism, but has instead become a terrifying weapon
From ACM Opinion
The Dream of U.S.-Made Computer Chips
Before we invest in making more chips on U.S. soil, we should be asking what we're trying to achieve
From ACM Opinion
Quantum Computing Nears a Quantum Leap
Quantum computers have experienced a number of notable improvements in recent weeks
From ACM Opinion
AWS Has a Sexy New Modernization Play: Mainframes
AWS announced a range of cool services at re:Invent 2021, but none more important than its Mainframe Modernization service
From ACM Opinion
Your Response to AWS Going Down Shouldn't Be Multicloud
It's convenient but wrong to assume multicloud will solve your application resilience woes
From ACM Opinion
Courts Must Stop Social Media Cos. from Co-opting the First Amendment
Federal appeals courts should strike down Florida and Texas laws but reject social media companies' broader arguments
From ACM Opinion
It's Too Late for Meta to Win over Washington
Lawmakers are not interested in the company's proposed concessions
From ACM Opinion
Facebook's Missteps Should Be a Lesson for Web3
The new crop of technologists building Web3 can still learn a lot from Open Graph's problems
From ACM Opinion
How Much Has Quantum Computing Actually Advanced?
John Martinis, former chief architect of Google Sycamore, offers a measured perspective on quantum's progress
From ACM Opinion
The Urgency of the Moment for Congress on AI and National Security
Congressional oversight of the intelligence community is critical to keeping pace with adversaries and gleaning accurate insights
From ACM Opinion
An AWS Inconvenience
The company's recent outage took down Adele, Netflix, Tinder, and more, but it could've been worse
From ACM Opinion
China Will Soon Lead the U.S. in Tech
Beijing pulls ahead in 5G and artificial intelligence, while catching up in semiconductors
From ACM Opinion
Truly Ethical AI Needs Research to Be Independent from Big Tech
Curb the power of Silicon Valley and protect those who speak up about the harms of AI
From ACM Opinion
Why We Must Rethink AI Benchmarks
While helpful in comparing AI performance, benchmarks are often taken out of context, sometimes to harmful results
From ACM Opinion
The Intersection of Math, Computers, and Everything Else
MIT senior Shardul Chiplunkar aims to be a translator between the tech world and the rest of society
From ACM Opinion
Human-Centered Explainable AI and Social Transparency
An interview with doctoral candidate Upol Ehsan, who researched human-centered explainable AI
From ACM Opinion
Securing Kubernetes Environments
Lack of resources is a massive blocker, so IT leaders need to prioritize
From ACM Opinion
The Father of Web3 Wants You to Trust Less
Gavin Wood believes decentralized technologies are the only hope of preserving liberal democracy
From ACM Opinion
Four AI Trends for 2022
Look for improvements to neural networks, strategic ethics, hiring practices, and even gastronomy