Seeing what’s really there. Inside: an AI map that tells old forest from tree farms, TB X-rays read four kilometers underground, and two more good things. ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
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This week in AI
Seeing what’s really there.
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A map that tells old forest from tree farms. TB X-rays read four kilometers underground. AI job training in Queens. Three minutes, start to finish.
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Stoic anchor
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“Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.”
Epictetus · Enchiridion 5 · translated by Elizabeth Carter
This week’s lead story is about telling old forest from farms that look the same from space. Epictetus asked something similar of us: separate the thing itself from the story we tell about it.
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The big one · Climate
An AI map tells old forest from tree farms.
From space, an old-growth rainforest and an oil palm estate can look alike, yet they hold very different amounts of carbon and biodiversity. Google DeepMind and Google Research, with the World Resources Institute and IIASA, released a free map that sorts every 10-by-10-meter patch of land on Earth into six forest and land types. It is described in Scientific Data on Oct. 21.
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90.2%
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Right land type
across all six types, at 8,190 sites checked by experts
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95.5%
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Forest or not
telling forest apart from other land, same sites
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1.7M
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Training examples
labeled locations around the world
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Google also shared an early yearly series, 2017 to 2025, that shows what replaced lost forest, like a timber plantation or a farm. That helps enforce an EU rule against products from land that was forest in 2020 and later turned into farmland.
The catch: planted forests are the hardest type for the map to get right, and shaded cocoa or coffee farms can still be mistaken for natural forest in some regions.
Source: Scientific Data · Google DeepMind
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Also good this week
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Health
TB X-rays read four kilometers down.
On Oct. 23, Google Research reported on its TB X-ray AI, now a certified medical device made by South Africa’s Nexus AI and used in about 40 health facilities. Over 90 clinicians have reviewed more than 25,000 chest X-rays with it, cutting the wait for a reading from weeks to under 45 seconds. At the Mponeng gold mine, miners are screened four kilometers underground, and anyone flagged can go straight for a confirming test. Clinicians make the final call.
Source: Google Research
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Farms
Smart farming already pays on 42% of cropland.
A University of Bonn-led study in PNAS on Oct. 19 estimates that robots, drones and AI tools already pay off on 42 percent of the world’s cropland. Strong environmental governance was by far the biggest predictor of where they pay, and the share could reach 75 percent if every country tightened its environmental rules. For now the tools suit big farms, so their potential in sub-Saharan Africa is limited.
Source: University of Bonn
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Work
AI job training for up to 40,000 New Yorkers.
On Oct. 22, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced the AI Jobs Institute, a training hub in Long Island City, Queens, that the nonprofit Pursuit will build and run with $10 million in public backing. It aims to serve up to 40,000 New Yorkers by 2032, helping people move from low-wage work into tech careers. Construction starts this winter, with a move-in planned for mid-2027.
Source: Pursuit
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Unexpected connection
Trained rats sniff out missed TB cases.
The nonprofit APOPO trains rats to smell tuberculosis in sputum samples that clinics in Tanzania and Ethiopia have already tested. A rat can check 100 samples in as little as 20 minutes, work that typically takes a lab technician up to four days with a microscope. Any sample a rat flags is rechecked with standard tests, and the clinic hears if it’s TB. Like the X-ray AI, the rats are a fast first pass, and people confirm.
Source: APOPO
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Try this week
One prompt. Not clever.
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Here's something that's bothering me: [describe it]. First, retell what happened in plain words a camera could record, with no judgments. Then list the judgments I added on top, and help me decide which ones are fair.
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Epictetus taught that an event and our opinion of it are two different things. Claude can help pull them apart when you’re too close to see it.
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Onward
Good news in AI, with a Stoic anchor.
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Your turn
What's one thing AI did for you this week that actually helped? Hit reply and tell me.
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