'Makes decisions' is a terrible headline for this story. A thermostat makes decisions. 'Makes a suprisingly sophisticated series of decisions' is more supporta

'Makes decisions' is a terrible headline for this story. A thermostat makes decisions. 'Makes a suprisingly sophisticated series of decisions' is more supportable. But whether you are surprised depends on your intuition about how complex a tiny machine with feedback from sensors and quite a lot of internal state can be. Since almost every biological system I've ever learned anything about is mind-bogglingly rich with complex dynamics, my default is to be unsurprised by rich externally-observable behavior.