That's a story that's been going on for literal centuries.

This is in response to people in the comments saying we should do lidar of the entire world and have AI find whatever it can.

I would humbly suggest that perhaps the most consequential looters might be more like script kiddies than bond villains. Just vicinity and convenience

IDK, this jungle terrain is very difficult to navigate

would be funny if they went there and it was already looted

Using slop engines to loot ancient ruins is an apt metaphor for what slop engines have already done to humanity's written corpus.

For their next trick, perhaps billionaires can exhume our dearly departed and see whether they have any gold teeth or baubles worth scavenging.

Lidar google map layer is going to be a thing.

This is in response to people in the comments saying we should do lidar of the entire world and have AI find whatever it can.

It isn’t about having value or not. Some people in the comments are talking about using lidar on the whole world and seeing what agents find. Thats a great way to give looters all over the world the heads up so they can rush over and steal whatever they can. Any archeological site has valuable information on what a slice of humanity’s world used to be. Giving looters a head start means destroying that information often permanently.

A helpful example might be Heinrich Schliemann, a businessman who fancied himself an archaeologist and destroyed much of Troy’s history by digging it up as fast as he could. He was so focused on finding treasure to prove to world he was a great archaeologist he irreparably damaged the real layers that were Troy.

From his wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Schliemann?wprov=sfti...

> His excavations were condemned by later archaeologists as having destroyed the main layers of the real Troy. Kenneth W. Harl, in the Teaching Company's Great Ancient Civilizations of Asia Minor lecture series, sarcastically claimed that Schliemann's excavations were carried out with such rough methods that he did to Troy what the Greeks could not do in their times, destroying and levelling down the entire city walls to the ground.

Looters will absolutely destroy a site to find valuables that may or may not even be there. Ai-khanoum is a classic example, with the vast majority of the site having been filled with pits on the off chance there were valuables. Nowadays they use bulldozers and excavators to loot at an industrial scale. It's pretty difficult to do archaeology on a pile of sifted dirt.