The Progress Report: Ancient Scrolls Decoded by AI!

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Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined by my co-host, Emma Varvaloucas, the Executive Director of The Progress Network. And this is our Progress Report, our weekly shorter form podcast. So Ms.Varvaloucas, as you have sat on your throne of information. What have you selected for us?

Emma Varvaloucas: I wish I could have a better title than that -if I have a throne, you know, it’s like information czar or something

Zachary Karabell: which title would you like?

Emma Varvaloucas: breaker of chains, mother of dragon, something like really, you know, with gravitas.

Zachary Karabell: I henceforth name you Mother of Dragons. You are the, you are the khaleesi of good news.

Emma Varvaloucas: So today I wanna revisit something that I last wrote about in the newsletter in the winter of 2024, and people love the topic then. So bringing it back for an update now, and that is the Hercule name Scrolls. So these were scrolls that were buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted, but they were carbonized.

So there was a villa in that city. It’s about 10 miles from Pompeii. And the villa had a library with nearly 2000 scrolls. 800 of those scrolls were excavated from the villa in, I believe it was 1750, but they couldn’t be read because they were essentially like charred logs. Like think about like a carbonized wood.

A carbonized tree. It was like that wrapped around a papyrus scroll. It’s the only library to survive from that time, and scholars believe that it’s a trove of ancient Greek and Roman works. And in early 2024. The founder of GitHub, uh, Nat Friedman is his name, launched this challenge called the Vesuvius Challenge to see if a tech could be developed that could read these scrolls without unrolling them.

Lots of people had tried to unroll them. You can imagine what ensued: lots of charred burned fragments, and someone actually did succeed. Actually, three people succeeded. So there is this tech now as an AI based tech, they first scan these scrolls and they need such a high resolution image that they actually can only be scanned using a particle accelerator.

So they scan them with a particle accelerator, and then this AI tech reads the inside of the scroll by identifying. What’s called crackle patterns in the ink. So like it’s literally reading the little bumps of ink that are rising off of the papyrus, and there are about 800 scrolls that are sitting in a library in Naples.

They have scanned five of them. 18 more are starting to be scanned at a particle accelerator in England. 50 more are about to be flown to France. So right after, not right after, but no. Yeah, right after they successfully read the inside of a scroll for the first time, which again was in the early months of 2024.

They started trying to get the rest of the 800 scrolls that are in that library in Naples, uh, scans. So progress is occurring on that front. 50 more about to be flown to France. They, for the first time recovered a title from one of the texts. Uh, the first week of May, this was on Monday that they announced this, and it was a text by the epicurean philosopher Emus, and the, the title was on Vices Book one.

It’s part of a multi-volume set. There are 10, 10 books. So just wanted to give people an update on that. It’s such a cool tech story. It’s also full of. So much little detail that’s also really cool. Like the scrolls are so fragile. They’re basically, someone told nature this, uh, they’re like paper mache glass, so if you drop them they will shatter.

So what they did is that they 3D printed bespoke little cases for them. So they printed them their little cases and then flew ’em around to England and France to be scanned.

Zachary Karabell: Wow, you’re, you really went deep into the wonky weeds with the Herculean Scrolls and the GitHub enhanced. How do we read these things? I mean, look, it is, it is fascinating and of course it would have other applications about how we read archeological TROs that have henceforth been unreadable that we haven’t been able to access, and, and the way in which this could open up.

Most of what we understand about antiquity in every country is fragmentary, like literally and metaphorically. We have little fragments of things along the way. You know, the, all the great plays of, of Greek tragedy. We have just a small, tiny little fraction of, of the corpus and the degree to which we could now potentially, I guess, open up a whole world of ideas and words.

And presumably this could be true of. Vedic scriptures in in India and elsewhere, Chinese, ancient Chinese scrolls is kind of a wild window into the past that has henceforth been at best, opaque, and at worst, completely shut. So it’s more than just like, oh, isn’t this cool tech? It’s like we have the potential now to kinda understand ourselves to a degree that would’ve been

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, and the library, they think the library has unknown works by Aristotle, for instance. Other big names, their their goal is to scan other big names.

Zachary Karabell: It turns out, it turns out about that, about that ethics thing on second thought.

Emma Varvaloucas: I know, I know. I mean, you’re joking, but it is like, they knew already that PHUs had written a, a 10 piece set on Vice and they thought that the first book was on flattery, but this book that they just discovered, which is called On Vice’s book one, is not on flattery. I know it’s a enormous discovery, but it, it actually is.

It’s a small example. ’cause not that many people know who Flatus is or like maybe really cares what he has to say about flattery, but. There are people that do, and it just goes to show that it’s gonna possibly, once they scan all these 800 scrolls, change our, our knowledge about the works of some old timey philosophers that we thought that we had already knew.

Fun fact caveat, depending on how you view things, the tech world is very small, so. One of the winners of the Vesuvius Challenge, uh, one of the people that read from inside the scroll for the first time, did later gain some notoriety because he started working at Doge. So just so you know, the tech world is small.

Zachary Karabell: Don’t judge the art by the artist.

Emma Varvaloucas: Exactly, exactly. So moving on from Mount Vesuvius and its victims, let’s, uh, talk about Maryland. It has reached its conservation goal of 30 by 30. This is a UN based goal, uh, set by. In ideally all countries in the world, not all countries are going to need it, but there are also some states that signed up for this goal is to preserve 30% of its land for conservation purposes by 2039 states in the US have signed up to achieve 30 by 30, and Maryland is the first one to actually do it way ahead of schedule.

So they’re now setting a bigger target of 40% protected land inside the state by 2040.

Zachary Karabell: And is this being done with incentives or tax breaks or like, do you know how this is working?

Emma Varvaloucas: A large part of this success has to do with a tactic that Maryland has had in place since 1969, says the New York Times, they have a 0.5% transfer tax on real estate sales, and that goes to a program called Program Open Space, which enables the state to acquire green spaces from voluntary sellers and to purchase conservation easements from private landowners. So that’s your answer. It’s not the whole shebang, but it’s in part how they did this. A big part.

Zachary Karabell: Well, we, we rarely do the whole shebang. Usually we do partial or semi shebang.

Emma Varvaloucas: It’s a 10 minute show. You know, there’s no time for a little shebang.

Zachary Karabell: there’s no time for the whole shebang. Uh, okay. Next item on your voluminous agenda.

Emma Varvaloucas: yes. Last but not least, I thought. This was very interesting. There’s a Bloomberg columnist who is arguing that we have passed peak alcohol consumption, like as a human race, like the entire world. 

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, that sucks. Given that I own a, I own a distillery, so that’s like, you think that that’s good news, but depends on where you sit.

Emma Varvaloucas: I have good news for you too, Zachary, as the owner of a distillery, that we are consuming less but spending more on alcohol.

Zachary Karabell: that’s, thank God. ’cause we definitely charge a lot of money for our gin and our vodka and our, our bourbon. So, whew. I, I much believe that, uh, the per unit amount of spend is going up, even of the overall consumption is going down.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yes. I can’t say that’s like a really relatable thing. I’m not sure a lot of people listening are gonna be like, oh yes, I was also waiting for that piece of good news. But if you were there, you are. And for the rest of us wine consumption, I learned from this article actually peaked in like. Seventies, the sixties or the seventies.

But beer consumption peaked relatively recently in 2016. He kind of does some analysis about, we’ve already had our younger demographic population, boom. A lot of the population boom is in Muslim countries that don’t drink a lot. He feels that it is time to say that we have passed peak consumption of alcohol, which is a departure actually from all of human history.

Uh, the more humans there have been, the more alcohol that has been consumed until now.

Zachary Karabell: no, it’s definitely true. The wine consumption is down a lot and beer definitely, you know, peaked a bit. I guess now you have all these hard ciders and different things that have sort of somewhat replaced beer, but the aggregate amount may be going down. And, uh, all kidding aside about my desire for all of you listening to go to mine hill distillery dot com, mine hill distillery dot com.

Buy, buy booze online if you’re over 21. And as a, as a net net, like a lot of people would be much better off drinking a lot less that that is unequivocally true. Just like it’s true that a lot of people would be a lot better off having better diets. I mean, there is everything in moderation and it is definitely true that X percentage of people in every society when when presented with an array of booze, will not drink to moderation.

So. This is like my public service announcement of drink responsibly or whatever the hell they say on the various commercials.

Emma Varvaloucas: Drink responsibly, but if you’re going to drink, buy stuff from.

Zachary Karabell: But if you’re going to drink, drink only gin and bourbon and rye from Mine Hill Distillery, which is mine hill distillery do com in western Connecticut, just saying, I hear people tell me.

Emma Varvaloucas: I should, uh, foreseen that this was gonna go in this direction.

Zachary Karabell: that, uh, on that very nonprofit note, we will sign off for this week’s progress report. I hope you all enjoy the Manhattans and Negronis that you’re gonna make with the product I’ve just mentioned. I should like hold up a bottle right now in the video part of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh my God. Here we go.

It’s like cross promotions. Uh, we will be back with you next week. Thank you Emma for highlighting said stories. And the Podglomerate for producing and the team at The Progress Network for putting it all together. And for you, our listeners, for listening, we do not take your time for granted. And we do not forget for one moment what an honor it is to be heard by you.