Cold war spy satellites and AI detect ancient underground aqueducts | Hacker News Reader

Cold war spy satellites and AI detect ancient underground aqueducts

newscientist.com

119 pointsBrajeshwar20 comments

Might be a chance to use AI to refine the search for ancient settlements that has been already done for years using Google Earth.

For example: https://metaldetectingforum.com/index.php?threads/using-goog...

This (the comment in the example link) is really an amazing sharing of learned information!

What this really tells me is that we have massive unreviewed data. This is imagery from decades ago still yielding fruit. We're getting close to having a replayable copy of history at centimeter resolution from multiple angles and through a broad spectrum.

> We're getting close to having a replayable copy of history at centimeter resolution from multiple angles and through a broad spectrum.

This is absolutely terrifying

This doesn't deserve to be downvoted.

The primary impediment to the implementation of a panopticon state has been the unrealistically high amount of human labor needed to analyze everyone's movements. With AI analysts, that barrier will be destroyed. Authoritarian governments are salivating at the prospect.

Technologists abject refusal to acknowledge fear as a valid response to certain tecnological developments will be our downfall.

"But building the Torment Nexus was really cool!"

And it produced a lot of shareholder value too!

"for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value"

https://economicsociology.org/2014/10/07/yes-the-planet-got-...

It doesn't have to be watching everybody. Just enough that the subjects believe their behavior to be under scrutiny, and police themselves accordingly. At least, that's the principle of the panopticon.

I've been reading We Have Been Harmonized, which talks about China's efforts to build something like this on a massive scale.

The classical panopticon was phrased that way ("pretend that you're watching and everyone will fall in line") precisely because actually paying attention was infeasible. But anyone with half a brain knows that, up until now, 99% of cameras that you see (or don't see) are completely unmonitored, meaning that smart dissidents understand how to deal with them. Once every single camera has an AI agent phoning home and producing a real-time map of everyone's movements at all times, this becomes orders of magnitude more difficult.

In the AI age, revolution becomes impossible. Hang on for dear life to your freedoms, because once they're gone, you're never getting them back, thanks to tech.

I think you are correct. The moon landing high resolution content is a great example of this.

https://archive.is/20240917041034/https://www.newscientist.c...

I learned about Qanat reading Desmond Bagley airport thrillers written in the 60s. It's part of a plot line dealing with middle eastern drug trafficking. When I met Persians in Australia 40 years later it was interesting to realise they were still significant in their culture. Keeping on top of the maintenance was a social capital exercise in frustration, endless mañana.

I lived in the city where it had the largest number of Qanats. Amazingly, they could still be used today as an efficient means of water transport, but the government has ruined them already, with sewage water, lack of maintenance, etc (what hasn't they ruined...)

Yazd?

Amazing city. Loved it.

We have similar (above ground, but still labour intensive) aqueducts on the dry side of the Alps, and you can see early beginnings of data processing in the solutions they came up with for the problem of "we want people to take water out of the system in direct proportion to how much labour they contribute to its maintenance" — including medieval one-way functions like broken tallies.

Would love some links to descriptions of these systems.

What is the go-to place to browse/find catalogued satellite image data?

You could try here:

https://www.planet.com/science/#programs

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