[HN Gopher] AI helps researchers dig through old maps to find lo...
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AI helps researchers dig through old maps to find lost oil and gas
wells
Author : gnabgib
Score : 99 points
Date : 2024-12-04 17:50 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (newscenter.lbl.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (newscenter.lbl.gov)
| juujian wrote:
| 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...
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Albert, such a helpful guy !
| postepowanieadm wrote:
| One day, when I have too much time and too much money, I will
| make a roguelike with map converted from old maps.
| physhster wrote:
| I'm sure the incoming administration will jump right on this.
| bastloing wrote:
| Yeah they're pro AI and pro business. Sounds about right.
| roboror wrote:
| It's pretty obvious you haven't read more than the headline.
| cpursley wrote:
| As if the outgoing one doesn't also need shitloads of energy?
| Airforce 1 and The Beast don't run on butterfly wings...
| twojacobtwo wrote:
| 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.
| physhster wrote:
| This is to cap forgotten wells, not exploit them again...
| karim79 wrote:
| That's the ticket! I've always known that AI will save us all.
| alephnerd wrote:
| The same methods have also been used to identify archeological
| sites [0]!
|
| [0] - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36015-5
| spydum wrote:
| I think this is cool but this is mostly being used to find leaky
| old forgotten wells.
|
| Not tap unused or forgotten wells. This is purely risk avoidance,
| which usually means it won't get much attention or funding.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > which usually means it won't get much attention or funding
|
| Leaky wells are a legal and insurance liability, which has a
| downstream impact on the financing of a drilling project.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| They are also a huge, unfunded public liability in many
| jurisdictions, like mine (Alberta). Companies disappear but
| their rec-rem responsibilities last forever.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| You have to find them to make the case to fund the remediation.
| Quantify, calculate, and communicate the risk and cost, then
| action.
| jofer wrote:
| 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...
| lovich wrote:
| > 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
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| 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.
| driverdan wrote:
| Because too many people now refer to all of machine learning as
| AI.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| All of machine learning _is_ AI. It 's a subset, by
| definition.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| [1] https://www.stern.de/gesellschaft/bergbauschaeden--
| zehntause...
| westurner wrote:
| Is securing old mines a good job for (remotely-operated
| (humanoid)) robots?
|
| Old mines can host gravitational energy storage.
|
| From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35778721 :
|
| > _FWIU we already have enough abandoned mines in the world to
| do all of our energy storage needs?_
|
| "Gravity batteries: Abandoned mines could store enough energy
| to power 'the entire earth'" (2023)
| https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/03/29/gravity-batteries-...
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| How long until AI can dig through old rabbit holes and come out
| with Mossad connected US politicians?
| jaggederest wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
| static/fiction/acceler...
| eichin wrote:
| 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.)
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| People should be confronted and shamed if their ancestors did
| this and they won't do right by them.
| oaththrowaway wrote:
| Why do I get the blame and shame for something my
| grandparents might have done wrong?
| agf wrote:
| If and only if you are still benefiting from that wrong, or
| others are still suffering for it.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Predecessors at work, sure. Ancestors? Nah. I'm sure I had
| some jerks in my lineage somewhere, and I don't owe anyone
| atonement for their acts.
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| 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.
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