alt Hacker NewsThis story is very cool, and it’s exciting to see how much progress AI will bring to every field. One thing to temper everyone from wanting to lidar the whole world is human capacity. Finding discoveries like this is essentially as hard as doing the lidar mapping. Now the issue will be getting archaeologist there in time before someone else does.
The best way to protect a site is to leave it alone. If we start finding dozens or hundreds of sites it will be more than what archaeologists can excavate and protest. Treasure hunters and looters don’t care about stratigraphy and the processes involved for doing research. Maybe the cat is out of the bag on this one, but good for thought.
Edit: I’m not saying we shouldn’t have people use AI to do this or that no bad actor will. This comment is in response to the sentiment I am seeing in the comments that we should lidar the whole world and have AI find any anomalous structures it can. There is no way for archeologists to excavate and protect all those places in that scenario
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Archeologists have been using Lidar equipped RC aircraft for quite some time now. With the way things are going it won't be too difficult to have a small swarm of UAVs doing the mapping soon.
"archaeologists can excavate and protest"
protest (argue against) -> protect (defend against harm)
the knowledge of these locations from the air should have some value in itself, no?
Well isn't it handy that recording lidar is really expensive, so we luckily won't be having large scale public access to data very soon
> The best way to protect a site is to leave it alone. If we start finding dozens or hundreds of sites it will be more than what archaeologists can excavate and protest.
Ain't the site itself the most important thing? As opposed to items: looters won't steal the site?
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Given that treasure hunters and looters can also use the process outlined in this blog post, leaving it alone seems like a guarantee that it will be explored by looters first.