Learning AI #34

Mt. Everest is 29,000 feet high. In order to facilitate climbing of the mountain, there are a series of camps set up at different heights. Most climbers start at Base Camp, which is at 18,000 feet.

Once you make that climb, you typically stay in Base Camp for several weeks acclimating your body to the thin air and building strength for the ascent to the top, which includes passing through four more camps, including Camp IV, located at 26,000 feet or the lower boundary of the Death Zone.

Because the body is actively deteriorating every minute it spends in this zone, climbers must use supplemental oxygen tanks and strictly limit their time on the summit ridge to get back below 26,000 feet as fast as possible.

The Death Zone claims 75% of commercial climbers that die on the mountain, but 80% of Sherpas die way down the mountain between Base Camp and Camp I. (The Sherpa people are indigenous to the Himalayan region, are accustomed to the thin air, and are hired by teams of climbers to help haul tents and other gear up and down the mountain.)

In the last 70 years, more than 60 Sherpa guides died on the Khumbu Icefall on Everest, the collapsing maze of ice between Base Camp and Camp I. Every one of those deaths happened because a Sherpa had to carry gear through the Icefall on foot.

Airlift Technology, a Nepali drone operator, ran cargo drones between Base Camp and Camp I all spring. Each flight took about eight minutes. Over the season they moved thousand of pounds of supplies up the mountain and thousands of pounds of trash down. That's work that used to mean six to eight hours on foot each way through the most hazardous stretch on the mountain.

A second drone mapped the Khumbu Icefall at centimeter-level detail, flying in temperatures below zero. It carried a laser rangefinder that flagged shifting ice and crevasse edges in something close to real time. The flying is the visible part. The hazard detection built into that mapping is the AI actually doing work.

In March 2025, an AI-powered Airlift drone found three stranded Chinese trekkers in under an hour. A painstaking ground search would likely have taken most of a day, at 16,000+ feet, in weather that kills people.

Sherpas were the obvious group to worry about this. A guide put it plainly to a reporter.

Sherpa charges for the higher end of the mountain are 10 times more expensive than the trek from Base Camp to Camp I. The dangerous, low-value hauling is what got automated.

The skilled, high-value guiding didn't get automated.

The AI in this story is doing specific tasks: reading terrain, flagging hazards, and transporting gear without risk of human life. While many fear AI will replace humans in certain jobs, this is one that everybody is happy about.

Things I think about

Octopuses have three hearts. Two of them stop beating when the octopus swims, which is part of why they would rather crawl.