Marginal Christianity

  By Bill McKibben June 5 Bill McKibben is a distinguished scholar at Middlebury College and a founder of the group 350.org.     If historians someday need to explain how mankind managed to blow the fight against climate change, they need only point to last month’s shareholder meeting at Exxon Mobil headquarters in Dallas.    The meeting came two days after Texas smashed old rainfall records — almost doubled them , in some cases — and as authorities were still searching for families swept away after rivers crested many feet beyond their previous records. As Exxon Mobil’s Rex Tillerson — the highest-paid chief executive of the richest fossil fuel firm on the planet — gave his talk, the death toll from India’s heat wave mounted and pictures circulated on the Internet of Delhi’s pavement literally melting . Meanwhile, satellite images showed Antarctica’s Larsen B ice shelf on the edge of disintegration.   And how did Tillerson react? By downplayi...

  April 18, 2015 Zeynep Tufekci   CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — THE machine hums along, quietly scanning the slides, generating Pap smear diagnostics, just the way a college-educated, well-compensated lab technician might. A robot with emotion-detection software interviews visitors to the United States at the border . In field tests, this eerily named “embodied avatar kiosk” does much better than humans in catching those with invalid documentation. Emotional-processing software has gotten so good that ad companies are looking into “mood-targeted” advertising, and the government of Dubai wants to use it to scan all its closed-circuit TV feeds.   Yes, the machines are getting smarter, and they’re coming for more and more jobs.   Not just low-wage jobs, either.   Today, machines can process regular spoken language and not only recognize human faces, but also read their expressions. They can classify personality types, and have started being a...