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The future is electric.
未来是电动的。
That means it will need a lot of batteries, motors and wires.
这意味着我们将需要大量的电池、马达和电线。
That, in turn, means a lot of cobalt, copper, lithium and nickel with which to build them.
反过来，这也意味着我们需要大量的钴、铜、锂和镍来制造它们。
Great times, then, for prospectors, and particularly for any who think they can increase the efficiency of their profession.
因此，对探矿者来说，尤其是对那些认为自己可以提高行业效率的人来说，这是一个大好时期。
Several firms are applying artificial intelligence (AI) to the process, both to improve the odds of surface strikes and to detect underground ore bodies that are invisible to current techniques.
几家公司正在将人工智能(AI)应用于这一过程，既提高了发现地表矿物的几率，又能探测到现有技术无法发现的地下矿体。
KoBold Metals in Berkeley, California, Earth AI in San Francisco and Verai in Boston are tiddlers at the moment, as are SensOre, in Melbourne and OreFox, in Brisbane.
目前，加州伯克利的KoBold Metals、旧金山的Earth AI和波士顿的Verai等公司都还处于起步阶段，墨尔本的SensOre和布里斯班的OreFox也是如此。
But at least one bigger fish—Rio Tinto, an Australian-British firm—is also keen.
但至少有一条大鱼——英澳合资的力拓公司——也很热衷于这件事。
They are garnering reams of geological, geochemical and geophysical data to feed to software models.
他们正在收集大量的地质、地球化学和地球物理数据，以提供给软件模型。
These, they hope, will spot patterns and draw inferences about where to sink new mines.
他们希望能够找到固定模式，并推断出在哪里挖新矿。
Some of the data are new.
其中一些是新的数据。
But a lot once mouldered in the archives of national geological surveys, journals of geology and other historical repositories—or, in the case of Rio Tinto, which has been operating for 150 years, sat in the form of rock cores in various sheds around the world.
但是很多都是曾在国家地质调查档案、地质学期刊和其他历史储存库中存放太久的数据，或者，就像里约廷托的情况一样，它已经运作了150年，以岩芯的形式在世界各地的各种仓库中存放。
Kobolds were mythical underground sprites that bedevilled miners in medieval Germany.
Kobold是一种神秘的地下精灵，在中世纪的德国一直困扰着矿工。
(They also gave their name to cobalt.)
(他们也给钴取了名字。)
Kurt House, KoBold’s boss, hopes some of their magic will rub off.
KoBold的老板库尔特·豪斯希望他们的一些神奇手段能够奏效。
His firm has reformatted archive data from around the world, many of which are on paper and some of which go back to the 19th century, into machine-useable form.
他的公司以机器可用的形式重新编排了来自世界各地档案数据的格式，其中许多是纸上的，还有一些可以追溯到19世纪。
That has permitted it to build maps of areas of interest all over Earth’s surface.
这使得该公司能够绘制出地球表面所有有意思区域的地图。
Some of those maps are used to train the company’s AI models.
其中一些地图被用来训练该公司的人工智能模型。
Others are used to test that software’s effectiveness by checking how good it is at predicting known ore deposits on maps it has not previously seen.
另一些则用来测试该软件的有效性，通过检查它在预测以前未见过的地图上已知矿藏的准确性。
If it passes, it can be let loose on under-explored places of interest, generating leads for KoBold’s geologists.
如果它通过了测试，就可以让其在未开发的有意思的地方自由发挥，为KoBold的地质学家提供线索。
