BOOK: Atlas of AI

A much awaited publication exploring environmental and human costs of AI. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence, Yale University Press.

While everyone is celebrating the use of articifical intelligence in education, medicine, transport, poicy and you-name-it-what-else, Kate Crawford's book brings to the for the power and the politics of what she describes as "neither artificial nor intelligent" (p.7 and 8). Starting with the question, how is artificial intelligence made (and imagined), Crawford states:

artificial intelligence is both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labour, infrastructures, logistics, histories, and classifications. AI systems are not atonomus, rational, or able to discern anything without extensive, computationally intensive training with large datasets of predefined rules and rewards. In fact, artificial intelligence as we know it depends entirely on a much wider set of political and social structures. And due to teh capital required to build AI at scale and the ways of seeing that it optimizes AI systems are ultimately designed to serve existing dominant interests. In this sense, artificial intelligence is a registry of power. (p. 8).

This, really, sais it all.

The rest of the book is doing a brillian work of historicising, tracing, mapping the AI and its extensive human and environmental costs, using "atlas" as a methodology - "seeing AI like an Atlas" (p. 9), taking cartography as a guide, a frame of seeing, a form of writing, and a way of poetic and political intervention.

Watch a book talk with Kate Crawford