How is AI made, and what are its full costs on a planet already under strain?
In this talk, Kate Crawford gives us an illustrated tour through her new book Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary costs of Artificial Intelligence, published by Yale in April 2021. Like Anatomy of an AI System, her 2018 work with Vladan Joler which mapped the material politics of the Amazon Echo, Atlas of AI explores the historical origins, labor practices, infrastructures, and epistemological assumptions that underlie the production of contemporary artificial intelligence.
Rather than taking a narrow focus on code and algorithms, Prof. Crawford offers a political and a material perspective on AI as an extractive industry: from lithium mines in Nevada, to the exploited workers behind “automated” systems, to the regimes of classification in training data. We see how AI is neither artificial nor intelligent, but a registry of power – which has only intensified during the pandemic at a time of extreme global inequality.
Crawford’s talk will be followed by a conversation with Mark Andrejevic, and discussion with the audience.
Both Kate and Mark are contributors to Liquid Architecture’s ongoing Machine Listening investigation.
Kate Crawford is a leading scholar of the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. Over her 20-year career, her work has focused on understanding large-scale data systems, machine learning and AI in the wider contexts of history, politics, labor, and the environment. She is a Research Professor at USC Annenberg, a Senior Principal Researcher at MSR NYC, and the inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
Mark Andrejevic is Professor in the School of Media, Film, and Journalism at Monash University where he researches the social, political, and cultural impact of digital media technology. He heads the Automated Society Working Group at Monash and is a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society. He is the author of Automated Media (Routledge, 2019).
