Communications of the ACM
The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2019
From ACM Opinion
How Voice Assistants Reinforce the Tech Gender Gap
Voice assistants are becoming commonplace in most homes and offices, but using women's voices for most devices may be doing more harm than good.
From ACM Opinion
The Planet Needs a New Internet
Everything you do online is underpinned by a globe-spanning labyrinth of physical infrastructure that wasn't built with a changing climate in mind.
From ACM Careers
Major Tech Companies May Be Putting World at Risk From Killer Robots
A new global report ranks 50 tech companies from 12 countries and identifies those at 'highest risk' of putting the world at risk through killer robot development.
From ACM Opinion
VR Could Be the Most Powerful Teaching Tool Since the PC
Virtual reality is much more than a gaming technology. In fact, VR has the makings of a pedagogical silver bullet.
From ACM Opinion
Silicon Valley Wants To Read Your Mind. You Should Be Worried
Mind-reading systems such as Facebook's brainwave-reading device and Neuralink's brain implants can affect privacy, security, identity, equality and personal safety.
From ACM Opinion
A Major Cyber Attack Could Be Just as Deadly as Nuclear Weapons, Says Scientist
Some of the international protections against nuclear conflicts don't exist for cyberattacks.
From ACM Opinion
CS Professor Says We Can Probably Make Email Better For Everyone
Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University, argues that our grandkids will be mystified by our addiction to email. He has some thoughts about how we got here and how we might do it better.
From ACM Opinion
Why Tech Will Never Be Able to Predict the Next Mass Shooting
Following the horrific mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton last weekend, President Trump called on social media companies to develop tools that could help identify violent shooters before they act. Technically, this is a nearly…
From ACM Opinion
Shoot-'Em-Up Videogames Don't Warp Minds – Big Tech Does
It takes a lot of effort, research, and efficiency to manipulate people online and influence their behavior in the real world. Silicon Valley has it down to a science.
From ACM Opinion
Western Academia Helps Build China's Automated Racism
Researchers in China are developing new and more invasive techniques to surveil the Uyghurs minority. Some of their work is being supported by academia in the West.
From ACM Opinion
Why Robot Umpires Are Inevitable in Baseball's Future
I don't know how long it will be before we get robot umpires calling balls and strikes, but the technology is here to do it today.
From ACM Opinion
Digital Textbooks Are Forcing a Radical Shift in Higher Education
The last several years have seen a shift in textbook policies at colleges and universities — one that has more recently turned tectonic.
From ACM Opinion
Op-Ed: 'Ethical AI' Matters — The Problem Lies in Defining It
News that Microsoft will invest around $1 billion to examine ethical artificial intelligence signals that the tech sector is thinking deeper about the ethics underlying transformative technologies. But what is ethical AI?
From ACM Opinion
Inflation Is Dead – And Technology Killed It!
What if the true lasting effect of technology is to deflate pricing power and kill inflation?
From ACM Opinion
AI Researchers Need to Stop Hiding the Climate Toll of Their Work
Researchers are sounding the alarm about the surprisingly large carbon footprint of the computations required for deep learning.
From Communications of the ACM
Block-based Programming in Computer Science Education
Considering how block-based programming environments and tools might be used at the introductory level and beyond.
From Communications of the ACM
A Response to Fake News as a Response to Citizens United
How boundaries on speech could free the market for speech.
From Communications of the ACM
MUST and MUST NOT
On writing documentation.
From Communications of the ACM
The Success of the Web: A Triumph of the Amateurs
Connecting the unique factors that influenced the origination and subsequent development of the World Wide Web.