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Communications of the ACM

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The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.

February 2020


From ACM Opinion

Eric Schmidt: I Used to Run Google. Silicon Valley Could Lose to China.

Eric Schmidt: I Used to Run Google. Silicon Valley Could Lose to China.

We can't win the technology wars without the federal government's help.


From ACM Opinion

How to Know if Artificial Intelligence is About to Destroy Civilization

How to Know if Artificial Intelligence is About to Destroy Civilization

These canaries in the coal mines of AI would be signs that superintelligent robot overlords are approaching.


From ACM Opinion

Should Government Halt the Use of Facial-Recognition Technology?

Should Government Halt the Use of Facial-Recognition Technology?

Critics say false positives are far higher for some groups of people than for others, but supporters of the technology says the actual numbers involved are tiny.


From ACM Opinion

Defeated Chess Champ Garry Kasparov Has Made Peace With AI

Twenty-three years after his loss to IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer, Garry Kasparov says people need to work with machines.


From ACM Opinion

The U.S. Needs a High-Tech Manhattan Project

The U.S. Needs a High-Tech Manhattan Project

The United States needs to wrest the high-tech initiative from China and re-establish American dominance in telecommunications, computation, artificial intelligence, and other key fields.


From ACM Opinion

Why We Can't Develop Voting Software That Works

Why We Can't Develop Voting Software That Works

Ever wonder why we could write software to get to the Moon, but not to count votes? Here are five reasons.


From ACM Opinion

We Need to Talk About 'Cloud Neutrality'

We Need to Talk About 'Cloud Neutrality'

Given how critical the cloud has become for a huge swath of the tech economy, maybe we should ask ourselves whether this infrastructure should be in the hands of a few trillion-dollar companies.


From ACM Opinion

Challenging the Myth of the 10x Programmer

Challenging the Myth of the 10x Programmer

A pervasive belief in software engineering is that some programmers are much better than others, and that their skills, abilities, and talents exert an outsized influence on an organization's success or failure. Data from a study…


From ACM Opinion

Towards a Conversational Agent that Can Chat About…Anything

 Towards a Conversational Agent that Can Chat About…Anything

In "Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot", we present Meena, a 2.6-billion-parameter end-to-end trained neural conversational model.


From ACM Opinion

Why Connected Cars May Never Come

Why Connected Cars May Never Come

John Paré tells the story of his first trip in an autonomous vehicle.


From Communications of the ACM

Are We Losing Momentum?

Are We Losing Momentum?

Estimating when the second half of the world will come online.


From Communications of the ACM

Are You Sure Your Software Will Not Kill Anyone?

Are You Sure Your Software Will Not Kill Anyone?

Using software to control potentially unsafe systems requires the use of new software and system engineering approaches.


From Communications of the ACM

Numbers Are for Computers, Strings Are for Humans

Numbers Are for Computers, Strings Are for Humans

How and where software should translate data into a human-readable form.


From Communications of the ACM

When Human-Computer Interaction Meets Community Citizen Science

When Human-Computer Interaction Meets Community Citizen Science

Empowering communities through citizen science.


From Communications of the ACM

Guiding Students to Develop Essential Skills

Guiding Students to Develop Essential Skills

Students should interact with one another to practice skills and construct their own understanding, with assistance from a teacher acting as a coach and guide — not a lecturer.

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