[OgsyedIE]

What is the proportion of villages where surveying the locals will lead to documenting an abandoned city that is otherwise only known to the locals?

If only 2% of villages have an undiscovered profitable heritage, then 98% of surveys will show no results, which makes it difficult for anthropological surveys to compete with lidar for grant funding, especially when lidar is still new enough to seem "sexy" and "sci-fi".

[dylan604]

Throw in some AI processing of the LIDAR data, and watch those funding dollars flood in!!

[AlotOfReading]

To put into context how few funding dollars there are in archaeology, the NEH currently has $800k available for archaeological field research proposals. That's the largest "funding agency" pool for generic field research.

This same funding agency that doesn't directly fund computer research also has $2.5M available for proposals specifically targeted to starting collaborations researching AI alignment. They have another $3.5M for the actual collaborations themselves, and an additional $2.2M for AI work that "contributes to scholarly research in the humanities".