It seems to me this approach could also be used for other aspects of mining. For instance, in Australia where I live there are many old gold, opal and other mines that have long been forgotten but which remain dangerous.
Most are unlikely to emit toxic or greenhouse gasses but they're nevertheless still dangerous because they're often very deep vertical shafts that a person could stumble across and fall in. These old mines were likely closed over when they were abandoned but often their closures/seals were made of wood that has probably rotted away over the past century or so.
It stands to reason that AI would be just as effective in this situation.
On the other hand, old gold mines tend to be the best place to find gold - the older the better since the technological capabilities for gold recovery today are much greater then those of the old miners (yet evidently they must've been finding something to think it worth to keep digging).
> Most are unlikely to emit toxic or greenhouse gasses but they're nevertheless still dangerous because they're often very deep vertical shafts that a person could stumble across and fall in.
That's a problem in Germany as well [1] - particularly in NRW, where most of Germany's mining activity is concentrated for centuries. About two or three times a week an old shaft collapses somewhere in Germany, leading to sinkholes - there's tens of thousands old mine shafts in the country and information on a lot of the legal ones got lost in one of the two world wars, and on top of these come quite the lot of illegal operations. Usually the damage is in some remote area, some forest or whatnot, but in some rare cases, entire buildings vanish or have to be condemned.
Can I suggest go out and touch grass and find a (known) mine shaft for yourself. Locations are on forums, be part of reality for a bit. Not saying explore it, just go to the entrance.
On TikTok urban cavers are pumping out old mineshafts and exploring them. I'm not going to link because it's cool having abandoned mines around. We are probably a decade off people bulldozing them all to think of the children and parents can teach their kids the dangers of Minecraft instead. So do it now.
I don't know what they mean by AI but this reminds me of an old fortune:
*** Special AI Seminar (abstract)
It has been widely recognized that AI programs require expert knowledge in order to perform well in complex domains. But knowledge alone is not sufficient for some applications; wisdom is needed as well. Accordingly, we have developed a new approach to artificial intelligence which we call "wisdom engineering". As a test of our ideas, we have written IMMANUEL, a wisdom based system for the task domain of western philosophical thought. IMMANUEL was supplied initially with 200 wisdom units which contained wisdom about such elementary concepts as mind, matter, being, nothingness, and so forth. IMMANUEL was then allowed to run freely, guided by the heuristic rules contained in its heterarchically organized meta wisdom base. IMMANUEL succeeded in rediscovering most of the important philosophical ideas developed in western culture over the course of the last 25 centuries, including those underlying Plato's theory of government, Kant's metaphysics, Nietzsche's theory of value, and Husserl's phenomenology. In this seminar, we will describe IMMANUEL's achievements and internal architecture. We will also briefly discuss our recent efforts to apply wisdom engineering to oil exploration.
Fine them at rates that dwarf whatever cost it would take to fix them. That would be the motivation necessary. Tell them they have 30 days after being notified before the fines start. Someone else on some other thread mentioned the ideas of exponentially increasing fines. Do that here.
They are also a huge, unfunded public liability in many jurisdictions, like mine (Alberta). Companies disappear but their rec-rem responsibilities last forever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8QWxJhna8Y shows off some of the efforts of https://welldonefoundation.org/ to actually do something once they find them - which also puts more emphasis on the abandonment part (specifically the industry irresponsibility involved in allowing them to become hazards in the first place.)
Your dad swindled thousands of "investors" out of their retirements and left you millions. You are benefiting from this and the children of the "investors" are suffering.
Your great-grand-dad swindled thousands of "investors" out of their retirements and you inherit a business empire. You are benefiting from this and the hundreds of great-grand-children of the "investors" are also suffering. They could've had inheritances but they didn't and work at Walmart.
You can trace your lineage to Thomas Jefferson who apparently owned 600 slaves over his lifetime. You still benefit from him having been a president and a wealthy man. You should have to trace ancestry of those slaves and compensate their current living family members.
This is super useful, but it's a bit disappointing to see map digitization called "AI".
I mean, sure, these are methods broadly in the computer vision realm and that gets referred to as "AI" sometimes. But at the end of the day, this is "find all unfilled black circles of a specified diameter on these images". It's amenable to (and has been done by) traditional computer vision methods for a long time. There are certainly a lot of cases where a CNN type approach can perform better than traditional computer vision and there are always improvements to make.
However, I think it's a bit odd to treat this type of use case as some sort of AI breakthrough that wasn't possible or wasn't frequently done in the past.
Why can't normal standard work have a press release? Why do we need to play pretend and add buzzwords just to make things sound "cool"?
...But that's just me being a bit bitter, perhaps...
USGS have maps from over 100 years ago. They have already been digitized. These are probably projects to search through like a person would looking for things. People that collect insulators used to collect the actual maps long ago looking for old abandoned telegraph line locations (compared to today).
AI is useful for searching for targeted stuff where you can replace a person doing something that is probably pretty easy, but there is a lot of work that can be automated. Like searching for new viruses. AI has made identifying new viruses relatively easy and much quicker than a person, who typically tweaks input and data looking through what is noise to identify genome sequence of a new virus.
> Why can't normal standard work have a press release? Why do we need to play pretend and add buzzwords just to make things sound "cool"?
> ...But that's just me being a bit bitter, perhaps...
Were you complaining as heavily about OCR or Markov chains ever being referenced as AI in their hay day?
The term “AI” is in an infinite treadmill and the day it stops being useable as a time sensitive reference is probably the day it surpasses humanity and becomes its own State
You can make highly accurate predictions of what contrarians will say by assuming that they define AI as "whatever computers can't do yet."
LLMs aren't truly intelligent. [No True Scotsman fallacy...] They don't really reason. [A distinction asserted without giving a falsifiable definition of reasoning...] They're just next token predictors! [Which must be mutually exclusive with intelligence, I suppose?] Etc, etc, etc. Find your favorite pretext to dismiss modern AI, ignore the holes in the argument, and satisfyingly conclude that it's all smoke and mirrors.
Consequently you see hilarious takes from skeptics, like comparing today's enormous investment in AI to when people sold blockchain cartoon monkeys. Or claiming that modern models aren't useful for anything, as if they exist in an alternative reality where hundreds of million of people don't use them daily, and there's no incessant firehose of new tools/products/results discussed in news/social media constantly.
> However, I think it's a bit odd to treat this type of use case as some sort of AI breakthrough that wasn't possible or wasn't frequently done in the past.
Classic computer vision is an utter PITA - especially when dealing with multiple libraries because everyone insists on using a different bit/byte order, pixel alignment, row/col padding, "where is 0/0 coordinate located and in which directions do the axes grow" and whatnot.
The modern "AI" stuff in contrast can be done by a human in natural language, with no prior experience in coding required.
Though headlines like these annoy me since we, the people, are being pressured to change our way of life when there are bigger fish to fry, I'm glad we trying to fix things within our control. Things like this shouldn't even be studied, they should be addressed aggressively and fixed so we can get a clearer picture of what we as individuals are responsible for.
This is a fun thing to think about - historical reconstruction. In the extreme, you end up with something like Accelerando[1]'s "resimulated" people - people recreated and resimulated in full fidelity from any and all available history, but who may never have actually existed. A bit like an AI hallucinating people.
Sad thing is that researchers and NGOs are policing away at old wells on a shoestring budget while the original operators have made off with lots of money. Extract the profits, socialize the damages...
I think the parent post was referring to the anti-environmentalist aspect of the new administration. They're not going fund remediation efforts while attempting to dismantle the EPA.
Also worth checking the unforgotten ones. When I was a child my grandparents would take me to one of the beaches that had many capped wells and we would kick the rusted lid off and throw rocks inside for the sounds. Either that or they were eye-balling it to see if I would fit.
Most are unlikely to emit toxic or greenhouse gasses but they're nevertheless still dangerous because they're often very deep vertical shafts that a person could stumble across and fall in. These old mines were likely closed over when they were abandoned but often their closures/seals were made of wood that has probably rotted away over the past century or so.
It stands to reason that AI would be just as effective in this situation.
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