My friends and colleagues are not convinced about AI
Here's my volcanic response from the Roman Empire
One of the joys of using #substack for writing is how easy it is to publish your thoughts and make them available to friends and colleagues in a safe and easy way through email notifications, avoiding the dreaded algorithms that have distorted nearly every other publishing platform.
I’ve been writing about AI for over a year now and I’ve been taken by the deep suspicions that some readers have about it, some who assume its an evil black box of which no good will come. This includes feed back from a professor colleague and one of my oldest and most intelligent friends.
Now I accept that AI, like any technology can be used for bad purposes, and that there are instances where this is true, and that there exist risks. Being optimistic about technology doesn't mean you have to ignore the risks of technology.
My purpose here is to give just one example that shows that it can be of immense value – in this case to understanding the history of humankind.
Mount Vesuvius, an active volcano near Naples in Italy, is famous for its eruption in AD 79, which destroyed the Roman cities of Pompeii and the city of Herculaneum. Thousands of lives were lost, and hundreds of ancient scrolls and scriptures were carbonized and buried. For about 2,000 years, they lay buried under 20 meters of volcanic ash, only to be excavated in the 1700s.
They were so delicate and prone to turn ash if mishandled that they couldn’t be read.
The Herculaneum papyri—roughly 600 scrolls, each around 30 feet long when unrolled—had been charred beyond recognition during the eruption. The scrolls, now kept at both the Institut de France in Paris and the National Library of Naples, are in such a deteriorated condition that they cannot be physically opened, as they would crumble into ash.
Way before ancient Rome became a male TikTok meme, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman’s mind was focused the Roman Empire.
Recently Friedman announced his Vesuvius Challenge that promised US$1 million in prizes to anyone who could find text passages buried within two of the charred Herculaneum papyri.
This week, Friedman announced that 21-year-old computer science student (and SpaceX intern) Luke Farritor deciphered the word “πορφυρας,” meaning “purple dye” or “cloths of purple,” within the scrolls. For this finding, Farritor won $40,000. That leaves the $700,000 Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize still unclaimed.
But Farritor and Nader’s discoveries were inspired by Casey Handmer, a polymath who years earlier pored over segmented CT scans and found a “crackle pattern” resembling ink but battled to identify the lettering.
Farritor trained an AI machine-learning model on Casey’s crackle pattern. He identified multiple ink strokes and more letters and used them as training data. His model started identifying letters and hints of words that weren’t visible to him. After he submitted his findings to the program, a panel of papyrologists noted 13 letters and identified that the hidden word is which means “purple” and is a rarity in ancient texts. Farritor deciphered the word “πορφυρας,” “Porphyras” meaning “purple dye” or “cloths of purple,” within the scrolls.
source: https://bit.ly/46yUrhZ
The purple robes in Pompeii were made using a dye called Tyrian purple, which was extracted from the glands of a species of sea snail called Murex. The process of extracting the dye was complex and time-consuming, involving crushing the snails and exposing the gland to sunlight for several days. The resulting liquid was then boiled, and a chemical reaction occurred that turned the liquid a deep purple colour. This dye was very expensive and was reserved for use by the wealthy and elite members of society.
Experts were amazed by Farritor's findings, describing them as groundbreaking achievement in reading previously inaccessible scrolls.