A bit like a volcano, AI walks through the door

Hundreds of scrolls remain to be opened, and both the data and the code are open to all.

2 min readJul 2, 2026 06:15 AM IST

First published on: Jul 2, 2026 at 06:15 AM IST

A dog walked into a tavern and said, “I can’t see a thing. I’ll open this one.” That’s it — that’s the joke. To get the humour, one would need cultural context from one of the oldest civilisations, Sumer (c. 3300-1900 BCE). Missing context is one of the ways in which an ancient text, though present, may still be “lost”. In other cases, the text’s physical condition may prevent it from being read. For instance, the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in Italy in 79 CE led to a whole library of scrolls being carbonised and preserved, but left too fragile to open. Until AI walked in and said, “I’ll open this one.”

A scroll from the Herculaneum library has now been “unwrapped”, though not literally — it was scanned using high-resolution X-rays, virtually reconstructed and flattened so that a machine-learning tool could bring out the traces of ink, allowing scholars to read the text. It turned out to be a treatise on ethics, perhaps authored by the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus. Hundreds of scrolls remain to be opened, and both the data and the code are open to all. Classicists are chomping at the bit, talking about all the ancient texts they dream of rediscovering. Some have brought up the lost dialogues of Aristotle, called a “river of gold” by Cicero. The nerdiest may yearn for the dictionary of the Etruscan language written by the nerdiest of emperors, Claudius.

This speaks to the duality of AI in academia: While it has arrived as a menace in the classroom, the possibilities it opens up for both scientists and humanities researchers are mouth-watering. It’s destruction and preservation wrapped up in one — a bit like a volcanic eruption.