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Kate Crawford in conversation with Trevor Paglen
April 30, 2021 @ 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm PDT
celebrating the launch of Kate Crawford’s new book
ATLAS of AI:Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence
published by Yale University Press
The Atlas of AI explores the hidden costs of artificial intelligence, from natural resources and labor to privacy, equality, and freedom.
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This is a virtual event hosted by Gray Area/San Francisco in conjunction with City Lights and Yale University Press. The event is free, but registration is required. Will will be posting a link to a registration portal shortly. Keep your eyes on this spot for the link.
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How is AI shaping our understanding of ourselves and our societies? In this book Kate Crawford reveals how this planetary network is fueling a shift toward undemocratic governance and increased racial, gender, and economic inequality. Drawing on more than a decade of research, award-winning science, and technology, Crawford reveals how AI is a technology of extraction: from the energy and minerals needed to build and sustain its infrastructure, to the exploited workers behind “automated” services, to the data AI collects from us.
Rather than taking a narrow focus on code and algorithms, Crawford offers us a political and a material perspective on what it takes to make artificial intelligence and where it goes wrong. While technical systems present a veneer of objectivity, they are always systems of power. This is an urgent account of what is at stake as technology companies use artificial intelligence to reshape the world.
Kate Crawford is a leading scholar of the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She is a research professor at USC Annenberg, a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research, and the inaugural chair of AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
Advance praise for Atlas of AI
“Eloquent, clear and profound—this volume is a classic for our times. It draws our attention away from the bright shiny objects of the new colonialism through elucidating the social, material and political dimensions of Artificial Intelligence.”—Geoffrey C. Bowker, University of California, Irvine
“An insightful excursion into the processes, implications and ethics of data creation and manipulation in the 21st century. Ranging across terrains as diverse as mineral mines, server farms, distribution warehouses, and AI startups, Crawford shows vividly how our systems have grown to be ‘dangerous when they fail and harmful when they work.’”—Joseph Turow, author of The Voice Catchers
“A must read. Moving from lithium mines to data extraction, from labor exploitation to government surveillance, Atlas of AI eloquently reveals how intelligence is ‘made.’ It displaces anemic calls for ‘ethics’ with probing investigations into the environmental degradation, capital accumulation, and labor conditions that AI makes possible.”—Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, SFU’s Canada 150 Chair in New Media
“Showing Artificial Intelligence as a technological achievement and cultural promise that spans politics, labor, land, and data, Crawford draws a unique and actionable map for seeing and challenging AI’s power.”—Mike Ananny, University of Southern California
“Kate Crawford looks at Artificial Intelligence with a humanist’s eye and an artist’s sense of what really matters. If you think AI is all about big data and machine learning, this marvelous book will remind you: it’s about the natural world, and politics, and history, and sometimes, even beauty too.”—Fred Turner, author of The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties
“In this eloquent and revelatory survey, Crawford limns the dire stakes of unbridled technological expansion. Methodologically original and keenly intelligent Atlas of AI is an indispensable map of the present that boldly calls readers to chart a more just and sustainable future.”—Alondra Nelson, President of the Social Science Research Council
“From the extraction of labor, latex, and lithium to the politics of proxies and Palantir, Atlas of AI is a rigorous interrogation of the power relations that reproduce AI, and a necessary mapping of its very limits. This is an essential book.”—Simone Browne, author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
“By brilliantly tracing the history, mythology, ethics and politics of artificial intelligence, Atlas of AI reminds us that the stories we tell about AI are just as vital as the mathematical models that comprise these systems.”—Ruha Benjamin,
author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
“Whether you’re a devoted researcher, an AI practitioner, or a general reader concerned about the growing power of data, this is an eye-opening tour of the planetary resources, laboring bodies, and relations of power that travel under the sign of AI, lending the empire of data its unsustainable life.”—Lucy Suchman, author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations
“Artificial Intelligence seems to haunt the world like a ghost in our machines. But as Kate Crawford shows in her vivid, unnerving book, this amalgam of algorithms, data, hardware is anything but immaterial. Atlas of AI is an outstanding contribution: the ghost of AI made visible.”—Peter Galison, author of Einstein’s Clocks