[HN Gopher] AI helps researchers dig through old maps to find lo...
___________________________________________________________________
AI helps researchers dig through old maps to find lost oil and gas
wells
Author : gnabgib
Score : 225 points
Date : 2024-12-04 17:50 UTC (1 days 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...
| Dah00n wrote:
| Well, that _is_ the American way.
| 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.
| schlauerfox wrote:
| Don't let dreams be dreams, start small, the minimum. One map,
| one screen. Just a toy for yourself. A little effort expended
| repeatedly yields compound interest.
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Of course, the company has to still exist
| Dah00n wrote:
| >Of course, the company has to still exist
|
| The system in place in the US means they mostly do not. A
| fund holding the amount of money it would take to clean up
| whatever you do on the land should be mandatory. Leave the
| land as -- or better -- than you bought it. Of course,
| that's very un-American.
| codingdave wrote:
| Huh, in my energy industry experience, we always
| remediated sites. And set aside funding for it before any
| construction was done. The cost estimation and funding of
| it was part of the initial planning and approval. I
| thought it was mandatory and mostly did happen. Some
| quick research says it is legally required, but IANAL nor
| an expert.
|
| Of course, that has not always been the case, and things
| falls through the cracks, but I would not immediately
| dismiss the entire industry as being non-compliant. I
| would dismiss the entire industry as flawed and needing
| change, but not on this specific point - it is vastly
| improved over past decades.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Of course, that has not always been the case, and
| things falls through the cracks, but I would not
| immediately dismiss the entire industry as being non-
| compliant.
|
| There's a point in time where this changed and permits
| needed at least a plausible expectation of remediation.
| If I had to guess that would have been late 1980s to mid
| 90s.
|
| Most of the sites abandoned without remediation are from
| permits obtained before that time. I'm sure there's some
| cases where there was a setaside for remediation and it
| wasn't sufficient and the corporate entities involved
| went bankrupt, so it wasn't finished; but IMHO, most of
| the problem is older sites. Older sites also tend to have
| worse records, so there's that too.
| Dah00n wrote:
| If you know they are out there (and we do know) then hiding
| your head in the sand until someone stuffs proof up your
| behind seems rather.... well, you get the point.
|
| In my opinion, that is like not fixing roads until someone
| collects data on potholes and forces you to, instead of
| actually keeping an eye on roads and bridges. A very American
| POV I'd say.
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| Your opinion is very European in that it assumes you can
| just walk around and find these. The US west where this is
| focused is vast expanses of open un occupied land and
| cannot just be inspected to find the abandoned wells from a
| century ago. Same for large parts of Australia, so no
| surprise the Australian commenters also find this
| interesting.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| The DOI has an orphaned wells program and it seems like one of
| the few things that the BLM does with bipartisan support.
|
| https://www.doi.gov/orphanedwells
| 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.
| jofer wrote:
| It's not that, it's breathlessly proclaiming that techniques
| that have been standards for decades are "groundbreaking AI".
| The hyperbole makes it impossible to get at anything, and if
| you accurately propose a time tested solution at work these
| days, it gets dismissed because it's "not AI". So now
| standard computer vision methods that aren't AI in any way
| are getting proclaimed as "AI". It's quite annoying, as least
| from the perspective of someone who does more or less this
| exact thing (geospatial analysis and data processing of
| various types) for a living.
|
| Folks won't let you use the right tool for the job anymore
| unless you make wildly hyperbolic claims about how
| groundbreaking it is and claim it's cutting edge AI.
|
| The situation is bad for everyone. There's nothing wrong with
| using the right tool for the job and accurately describing
| it. I'm tired of having to inaccurately describe methods to
| be allowed to use them. E.g. claiming a Hough transform is
| "deep learning" so folks won't immediately dismiss it and
| demand I use some completely incorrect approach to a simple
| problem.
| 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.
| mrweasel wrote:
| The issue is that the terms have escaped the computer
| science labs and the media and the public have latched on
| to AI, and uses it for everything.
|
| It is true that all of this, machine learning, large
| language models, natural language processing and much more
| is AI, in the sense that it falls under the same artificial
| intelligence umbrella in computer science. It just feels a
| little like some one is using the term "construction" over
| and over, but what they are specifically talking about is
| some very specialized type of carpentry. It's not wrong,
| it's just not all that precise and give the wrong
| impression.
| 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.
| jofer wrote:
| It's usually the exact opposite for this sort of thing. You
| can't do this with natural language. Traditional computer
| vision is well suited to it and works with some tweaks.
| "Modern" techniques for it require collecting insane amounts
| of training data for simple things. You can't just throw
| transfer learning at this because it's a lot different than
| standard photographs that models are trained on. The old
| school methods are faster and more reliable for a significant
| number of problems in the geospatial world. And you still
| need a lot of deep expertise no matter what.
| Hilift wrote:
| 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.
| 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...
| creshal wrote:
| And for a long time, it was legal to have fun constructs like
| "so the mine entrance goes horizontal for a bit until the
| main shaft starts right under the local orphanage", so
| sinkholes can be all sorts of fun.
| HdS84 wrote:
| In Mendig (Eifel) there is an enormous mine for millstones
| which was in us for the whole middle age until the 19th
| century or so. Most people just dug down from their Celler
| and the whole city stands on enormous caverns.
| saalweachter wrote:
| As an American, I tend to think that D&D contrivances
| like "everyone's basement is connected to a massive
| labyrinth" are unrealistic, but ...
| 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-...
| XorNot wrote:
| 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).
| aaron695 wrote:
| > could also be used for other aspects of mining.
|
| Can you link to even one Australian georeferenced historical
| topographic map with 'gold, opal or other mine shaft' in it
| that their AI uses?
|
| How the hell would a gold mine shaft get on a topographic map?
| (mining leases are just checkerboards -
| https://treloars.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/112669_00.jpg?...
| )
|
| I really don't understand HN.
|
| 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.
| zeofig wrote:
| It's simple really. You use the power of imagination. In your
| mind, AI can do anything!
| nkrisc wrote:
| And the other side of HN, where abandoned mineshafts are a
| societal good and bulldozing hazards that blight the
| landscape makes kids soft?
| defrost wrote:
| It seems to be this approach (using AI to identify symbols on
| old maps) would be useless in finding old shafts in Australia
| as such things pepper the landscape in various regions (eg: the
| Kalgoorlie goldfields) but the majority were rarely marked on a
| map beyond the obvious lease records that exist that _probably_
| had shafts _somewhere_ within the lease pegs.
|
| A better approach would be to tune an "AI" or rather an
| adaptive Kalman filter variation to highlight probable shafts
| from airborne EM and|or ground ERT surveys:
|
| *
| https://www.earthdoc.org/content/papers/10.3997/2214-4609.20...
|
| *
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001379522...
|
| * https://nextinvestors.com/learn-to-
| invest/mining/electromagn...
|
| *
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_tomogra...
|
| * Variations on this type of thing:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00983...
| jvanderbot wrote:
| A kalman filter does what, in this case? Pardon my ignorance,
| but I have only seen that used for estimating locations /
| parameters of some process or target, not for determining
| existence ("is N>0?") or amounts ("what is N?").
|
| You could cobble together a quantity estimation doing some
| kind of batch data association with noisy "presence"
| measurements, but you're probably not much better off than
| k-means at that point and any KF-based measurement will
| basically just say "Yes N>=1" because the probability is
| nonzero.
| defrost wrote:
| There's much fun to be had with filters of varying kinds -
| in airborne mag KF filters can be used for removing heading
| induced signal - variations due to the plane travelling in
| specific headings wrt earth magnetic field.
|
| In a similar handwavy fashion, after picking instrument
| paramers and distances that might twitch on shaft
| responses, filters can be zeroed on regions with no shafts
| to see if an enhanced response can be amplified when
| processing the return over ground with a shaft to the
| surface.
|
| Other tells for lost 'hidden' shafts might include Lidar
| profiles of spoil heaps .. these are clear in some cases,
| eroded and softened in many others.
|
| A good many old shafts are visible from the air in any
| case; more so at some times of days than others - if the
| will is there to map them then a first pass combo of visual
| processing and lidar returns to map out open shafts is a
| good start.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| > KF filters can be used for removing heading induced
| signal
|
| OK - fits what I'd use them for
|
| > filters can be zeroed on regions with no shafts to see
| if an enhanced response can be amplified when processing
| the return over ground with a shaft to the surface
|
| OK - I see, look for outliers as positives, though the
| input signals here are not clear I can see the path. Your
| KF filters produce a "likely signal" and that is used
| downstream to actually do estimation. Probably, if I've
| learned anything, by plotting those "likely signals" on a
| map and dispatching a team with cameras.
|
| > Other tells for lost 'hidden' shafts might include
| Lidar profiles of spoil heaps
|
| Here we're outside what I'd call just "filtering". It's
| more like a big data science problem to model and label
| mounds.
|
| I was just confused by zeroing in on "KF" in the comment
| above. If we're talking a big data pipeline, then yeah,
| KF has its place in all that.
| mimentum wrote:
| There already exists, GeoResGLOBE.
|
| https://georesglobe.information.qld.gov.au/
|
| Go for your life ;)
| lm28469 wrote:
| The problem is that if oil/mining companies had to take care of
| old wells/mines they'd instantly go bankrupt.
|
| The only reason they make so much money is because they
| disregard externalities
| aziaziazi wrote:
| You mean, like other companies with worldwide concurrence?
| gosub100 wrote:
| Take care of old mines from other companies?
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| They'd still make tons of money if they had to cleanup their
| spills and old mines. They're just greedy and want to make
| more.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > They'd still make tons of money
|
| I don't think you understand the scale of the problem...
| Plugging leaking wells in the US alone is estimated to cost
| $280b, that's 10 years of net profit for Shell or
| ExxonMobil. Even taking the top 5 world oil companies
| _profit_ from 2022 (most profitable year so far) you're
| short $80b, for the US alone, and that's only onshore
| wells.
|
| > Researchers estimate that there are between 2-3 million
| abandoned oil and gas wells in the United States, and more
| than 117,000 of those, across 27 states, are "orphaned"--
| that is, uncapped, unproductive, and with no responsible
| party identified to manage leakage or pollution risks
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/24/plugging-methane-leaking-
| oil...
|
| https://www.sciline.org/environment-energy/abandoned-oil-
| gas...
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| If the companies can't responsibly operate as a for-
| profit entity, nationalization seems like a reasonable
| path forward.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| The problem is if software companies had to take care of
| their old programs/vulnerabilities they'd instantly go
| bankrupt.
|
| I think you will find many oil and mining companies have gone
| bankrupt(as well as software companies) and that the problem
| is a bit more nuanced than just treating the entire industry
| as a single monolithic entity.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Many of the oil and gas (and coal) companies that have gone
| bankrupt are part of a deliberate ploy to load up debts and
| externalities on firms that go bankrupt so that the people
| who benefitted can escape their responsibilities.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| And last I checked, tight oil US companies (taken together)
| were _not_ even profitable (except for a single quarter) even
| _despite_ a low interest rate financial environment and
| wildly insufficient funds dedicated to cleanup ?
| 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.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| That's a very slippery slope.
|
| How do you define "benefit"?
|
| 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.
| lukan wrote:
| Slippery slope indeed.
|
| But if your wealth comes from a line of crime, then yes,
| compensation would be adequate.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Cool! How far back are we going? What evidence is
| required?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| However far back and whatever evidence needed until it
| starts affecting us.
| qup wrote:
| I have some neanderthal DNA, and you extincted my people,
| so let's start settling up
| toast0 wrote:
| Morally, sure, if you know your wealth is sourced from
| crime, you likely have a moral obligation to disgorge it.
|
| Practically, that's difficult. If you grew up wealthy
| because of generational crime that provides life
| advantages you can't return. At best, you could make sure
| you direct any inheritance to victims if possible or a
| suitable charity (and not your family foundation).
|
| Legally, this is not plausible. All sorts of legal
| principles dictate that lawsuits must be timely (for
| various values of timely) and estates become
| unlitigatable not very long after they're closed. There
| are some cases in the news about crimes in WWII and such,
| though.
| lukan wrote:
| It is a very complicated topic.
|
| But the law knows such things in principle, even though
| usually not individually, but rather collectivly.
|
| Like the native americans get some sort of privilege
| today. And (some) black americans demand reparations for
| past slavery.
|
| But where to draw the line indeed. I don't think there is
| a universal answer.
| 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:
| Guess I don't mean all ancestors, mainly talking about
| multi-generational wealth here.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Like north Korea does in the gulag? Three generations of
| punishment?
| nerdponx wrote:
| That's a huge amount of effort (and carbon-fuel-powered energy)
| involved in capping the well. Based on the numbers they
| provide, I guess it's still worth it even if you consider the
| lifecycle of all the trucks and equipment and concrete. But
| that is quite an expensive procedure. Is it really so important
| to completely plug the hole with impermeable concrete? You
| can't plug it 1/3 of the way and then put a metal cap on with a
| 10-year maintenance schedule?
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Study is the necessary predecessor to fixing.
| candlemas wrote:
| 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.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| If anybody likes treasure hunting, there are lots of lost gold
| mines too
|
| You can come across the land parcel claims sometimes by families
| that don't have the capital to mine
| rwmj wrote:
| I found out Red Hat is now using AI to dig through git commits in
| large upstream projects to find out what new features were added
| and removed, to direct downstream QE efforts. It's done with a
| human review afterwards. Kind of interesting, not sure yet how
| well it'll work in practice.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > downstream QE efforts
|
| What does this phrase mean?
| rwmj wrote:
| https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/what-open-source-upstream
| uz44100 wrote:
| AI seems to be everywhere these days. That was gonna happen one
| day. This is gonna be really interesting in coming days.
| _heimdall wrote:
| We really need a more clear definition of what "AI" means.
|
| What the article describes sounds like it could have been built
| with 10 year old image processing tools and basic algorithms
| crunching the large amount of sensor data used to identify
| potential wells.
|
| What makes this tool AI rather than an algorithm? Or machine
| learning?
| acdha wrote:
| Computer vision is AI, it's just not an LLM: a computer is
| performing work like our brains do. Your argument is basically
| what Bertram Raphael was saying in the 1970s: "AI is a
| collective name for problems which we do not yet know how to
| solve properly by computer".
| gosub100 wrote:
| Some CV is AI, like "identify pictures of cats", but not
| straightforward filters in an algorithm such as "narrow the
| bands of visible light to those that make existing mineshafts
| stand out, then scan the entire continent recording the top
| 20% of matches for this value (with some wiggle room to
| account for variants)".
|
| That is very much manual intelligence
| lm28469 wrote:
| It's simple: AI is what you call it when it's useless / when
| you don't know what you're talking about / when you're looking
| for investors money. When it becomes useful it gains a name,
| like "computer vision", "machine learning", "natural language
| processing", "image generator"
| _heimdall wrote:
| > Researchers used the AI algorithm to scour four counties of
| interest that had substantial early oil production - Los Angeles
| and Kern counties in California, and Osage and Oklahoma counties
| in Oklahoma - and found 1,301 potential undocumented orphaned
| wells. So far, researchers have verified 29 of the UOWs using
| satellite images and another 15 from surveys in the field;
|
| It would be really helpful if they called out how many potential
| wells were inspected and couldn't be verified. Are they
| confirming at 100% or 10%?
| dc0848 wrote:
| Could it help me find my keys I lost this morning?:))
| TuringTourist wrote:
| There is a (likely small) chance that you lost your keys in an
| unknown or lost oil/gas well. So yes, in theory.
| reflectiv wrote:
| I was a developer at Shell a couple years back and led a project
| where we were using nascent GPT-1/2 to process and search over
| mountains of documents. It was a fun project where I wrote a
| complex/fancy UI for a stratigraphic filter and indexing
| system...
|
| Seems this is just a natural progression...neat.
| tikkun wrote:
| That's pretty cool that Shell was such an early adopter.
|
| Who led the adoption of GPT-1/2 there - a developer, you, a VP,
| someone else?
| reflectiv wrote:
| AI in general at the time was led by a VP and a particular
| group (that was AI tech specialized) under him. The initial
| idea came about from them. We were trying to find new ways of
| using AI to research new sources of crude at the time.
|
| Another AI project I worked on there was a chemical tank use
| estimation and refuel application which used tank sensors,
| previous use history and some other metrics to pre-purchase
| and deliver product to keep tank reserves above a certain
| threshold.
|
| For context, all of this was circa 2018-2021.
| fulafel wrote:
| As we regulate AI with concerns energy and emissions, wouldn't
| this be the low hanging fruit to forbid first?
| thuuuomas wrote:
| The negative tone of some comments here betrays that techno
| optimist suggestion that tech will solve environmental issues.
| Clearly, the incentives just aren't there!
| DrillShopper wrote:
| Tech has caused more and worse environmental issues than it has
| ever solved.
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