Communications of the ACM
The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2023
From ACM Opinion
Do We Need a National Algorithms Safety Board?
Perfectly safe algorithmic systems are not possible, but safer systems are.
From ACM Opinion
Medical AI Is as Much Social as It Is Technological
Medical AI applications need to overcome transparency and trust issues.
From ACM Opinion
Large Language Models Will Change Programming…a Little
Hype has been a primary driver of the excitement around LLMs.
From ACM Opinion
With AI, We Are Reliving the Start of the Smartphone Era
We often judge the utility of a new technology on how well it deals with the problems of older ones.
From ACM Opinion
Who Is Liable when AI Kills?
We need to change rules and institutions while still promoting innovation to protect people from faulty artificial intelligence.
From ACM Opinion
Self-Driving Cars Are Doing More Harm than Good
Promises that self-driving cars would revolutionize transportion continue to fall short.
From ACM Opinion
Why You Should Not Trust AI Search Engines
The technology is simply not ready to be used like this at this scale.
From ACM Opinion
ChatGPT Can Improve Education, not Threaten It
A professor explains why he is allowing students to incorporate ChatGPT into their writing process instead of banning it.
From ACM Opinion
Let Section 230 Stay
Removing immunity for algorithmic recommendations would make it nearly impossible for social media platforms as we know them to function.
From ACM Opinion
Section 230 Has to Go
The Internet is a toxic waste dump.
From ACM Opinion
What Is Wrong with ChatGPT?
AI is being designed and deployed by corporate America in ways that will disempower and displace workers and degrade the consumer experience.
From ACM Opinion
Mr. President, Healthcare Has a Data Problem
The U.S. healthcare system is plagued by inefficiencies, in part due to deficiencies of health data interoperability between electronic health records and other health data systems.
From ACM Opinion
U.S. Science and Technology Offer Hope for the Future
The scientific advances announced in recent months are thrilling, capable of sustaining our economic and military competitiveness for decades to come.
From ACM Opinion
Stop Passing the Buck on Cybersecurity
Why companies must build safety into tech products.
From ACM Opinion
Machines Learn Better if We Teach Them the Basics
A wave of research improves reinforcement learning algorithms by pre-training them as if they were human.
From ACM Opinion
ChatGPT: Five Priorities for Research
Conversational AI is a game-changer for science; here's how to respond.
From ACM Opinion
"Conversational" AI Is Really Bad at Conversations
Conversation without change is just a five-finger exercise.
From Communications of the ACM
Four Ways to Add Active Learning to Computing Courses
How active-learning techniques can benefit students in computing courses.
From Communications of the ACM
The Elephant in the Room
It is time to get the POSIX elephant off our necks.
From Communications of the ACM
Ethical AI is Not about AI
The equation Ethics + AI = Ethical AI is questionable.
From Communications of the ACM
The Premature Obituary of Programming
Why deep learning will not replace programming.
From Communications of the ACM
An Analysis of Black Faculty in CS Research Departments
Exploring Black faculty at computer science research departments where Ph.D. programs exist.
From Communications of the ACM
Building Machine Learning Models Like Open Source Software
Proposing a community-based system for model development.
From Communications of the ACM
Software Engineering of Machine Learning Systems
Seeking to make machine learning more dependable.