“These things are hard to tip over,” geologist Wilson Bonner assures me as the four-wheeled all-terrain vehicle he’s piloting tilts suddenly sideways, pitching me toward the churned up mud beneath our wheels. We’re grinding up the side of a thickly forested hill in rural Ontario, Canada, on a chilly fall day, heading toward a spot that Bonner’s employer, startup KoBold Metals, says represents the marriage of cutting-edge artificial intelligence with one of humanity’s oldest industries.
We do indeed complete the half-hour trek relatively unmuddied, finally breaking through a ring of broken trees and mangled brush into a swath of bulldozed mud. A black pipe about as wide around as my
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