Toby Wilkinson: prediction

Transcript context

…How is it we’re likely to learn more about Ptolemaic Egypt? Is it underwater discovery, DNA studies, LiDAR, recovering manuscripts using AI? What are the frontiers for learning more? All of the above. You’ve just put your finger on it. Only recently, there’s been underwater archaeology, which has reconstructed the appearance of one of the islands in the great harbor of Alexandria, which it turns out Cleopatra spent a great deal of time fortifying and turning into a great commercial/dynastic port. That’s only come up out of the sea in the last year or two. That’s pretty astonishing. The fact that we can now read rolls of papyrus without unrolling them through X-rays and AI, we are poised really at the beginning of a revolution in the study of ancient texts because many of these papyrus rolls are too friable, too fragile to unroll. If we can now read them with modern technology, that will open up whole new vistas of understanding of the ancient world. Archaeological science is really poised to make some huge new breakthroughs, I think, in the study of the ancient world. What’s the binding constraint? Obviously, money always matters, but is there enough talent, and interest, and people who know the languages or who know AI to do this? What’s holding back progress from not being faster?…

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