https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/automating-historys-first-draft/

As 2019 draws to a close, prepare for endless roundups of the year's most important news stories. But few of those stories may be remembered by 2039: new research shows the difficulty of predicting which events will make the history books.

Philosopher Arthur Danto argued in 1965 that even the most informed person, an “ideal chronicler,” cannot judge a recent event's ultimate significance because it depends on chain reactions that have not happened yet. Duncan Watts, a computational social scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, had long wanted to test Danto's idea. He got his chance when Columbia University historian Matthew Connelly suggested analyzing a set of two million declassified State Department cables sent between 1973 and 1979, along with a compendium of the 0.1 percent of them that turned out to be the most historically important (compiled by historians decades after their transmission).