An important point to consider: who will be the archaeologists of the future? Odds are, it won’t be dusty old humans with toothbrushes and khaki shorts, but super-advanced, super-dexterous AGI robots with processing power that makes a Cray supercomputer look like an abacus (assuming no intervening doomsday scenerios). These brainy bots will be sifting through the ruins of Amazon warehouses and TikTok archives with algorithmic precision.
They’ll likely interpret our artifacts with a very high degree of accuracy—no mistaking an iPod for a religious idol. But there still may be some misfires. Even with perfect data, interpretation depends on context, nuance… even human absurdity comes into play. So sure, the AI will know what a fidget spinner is—but why we were so obsessed with them? That might still leave them scratching their non-existent heads.
I dunno. I’m reading “alien clay” by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and he hypothesizes a lot of cheap, disposable human laborers. Because good machines are expensive, and people who have gotten in trouble with the law are cheap.
(It’s archaeology on a different planet, but the basic idea that it might be cheaper to use slaves than machines seems legit.)
Most archaeological relics today aren’t dug up by archaeologists, but by laypeople who happen to be digging in the wrong spot, and then (if we’re lucky) think “This doodad I just found seems neat; I think I’ll keep it and show it to some folks”. And I suspect that that will continue to be true, no matter how good the actual archaeologists get. Archaeologists now are already meticulous enough; the problem is that they usually don’t get there first.
True enough—but if archaeology becomes a future priority, I can see swarms of cheap, tireless digger-AGI bots spread across prime sites, systematically unearthing and analyzing everything from smartwatches to sex toys. With superhuman pattern recognition, they’ll likely get most things right.
I could certainly imagine that if we have access to swarms of drones that can scan every inch of a site as it is dug in layers, and these swarms are cheap enough, it might become mandatory to run them over a site as it is prepared for construction.
That would be fantastic—and honestly, long overdue. It saddens me to think how many amazing artifacts have already been lost to careless construction. If drone swarms become cheap and standard for scanning sites before digging, we might finally start balancing progress with preservation.
If we have bots that can do archeology, we’d likely have bots doing all the construction, too. It would be fairly trivial to have a subroutine running that immediately flags anything a bot sees that might be of historical significance when it’s digging, and you likely wouldn’t get the robots saying, “Nah, fuck it, it’s just a rock…”
Though of course ALL archeology (and paleontology) is an act of destruction just by disinterring things to expose them to getting lost or destroyed. In Larry Niven’s World Out of Time the protagonist has to explain what “dinosaurs” were to future descendants, since every fossil of note was long since dug up and then eventually lost.
Yes, I think the first few pages would have to be a graphical tutorial for the basics, like binary representation and logical operators. It wouldn’t have to be a full explanation since they aren’t going to be able to emulate things quickly enough unless they already understand binary. The point would just be to transmit the language and notation.
It might be easiest to just go straight to a simple but modern instruction set like RISC-V. It wouldn’t take too much work to describe the whole thing. Though with a little extra effort, you could make those future historian’s lives easier by implementing it in terms of an even simpler instruction set. Might be kind of a fun project.
Slaves are “cheap” if you ignore the whole infrastructure to control and support them and the fact that they contribute less to the economy, but are expensive on the social level. They’ve been historically popular because slavery is good at concentrating all the wealth at the top of society, even if society as a whole ends up poorer. And of course the sheer joy of abusing and murdering people.
And they do an inferior job to boot; archaeology is the last job you’d want a slave to do unless you’re deliberately trying to wreck the project.