(satire) *Prisoner Given 10 Extra Years For Good Behavior To Serve As Role Model For Fellow Inmates.*

Exxon scientists in the 1970s and 1980s presented executives with a fairly accurate projection of what global heating caused by fossil fuels might do to the world in a few decades. But they presented it as a possibility;

with all the gaps in the scientific knowledge of that time, they could not determine whether those things would really happen.

By around 2000, the science had resolved the uncertainty and fossil-fuel executives could not honestly deny the damage they were going to cause.

US gun fanatics have won the battle of competing pressures on US business,

They have even passed state laws to boycott banks that reject gun companies as clients.

In news coverage of homicides in the Boston Globe, from 1976 to 1984, stories where the victim was black were less likely to use language that would encourage seeing the victim as a human being than stories about white victims.

This must reflect racism in some way or other. I'd be very interested in whether it is the result of racism of the writers, or some sort of systemic racism.

I am puzzled that the article says that this used "artificial intelligence", but it doesn't say what that is meant to refer to. I am dubious that something as complex as reasoning software or machine learning was needed to categorize the stories.

Evgeny Morozov: *The problem with artificial intelligence? It’s not artificial or intelligent.*

That is true, about today's neural-network systems. However, generalizing that into a prediction of impossibility for all kinds of technology is likely to be mistaken. If something isn't impossible for known reasons, the prediction that it can't be done is likely to be falsified some day.