Atlas of AI is a book that strikes profound chords in the reader. It is both a well-researched example from the artificial intelligence field and an instructional guide on how to think “smartly” about the subject. Kate Crawford’s adroit use of a geographical planetary map of technoindustrial wastelands situates and problematizes the Big Tech boom. She starts with San Francisco, where gold mining in the nineteenth century created a rush of robber barons and a boom era of “extraction” that coincides with the excessive milking of everyone’s data from our current interface, the technological “device.” Throughout Crawford’s text, techno-mechanisms that claim a heroic stature are viewed as near exploitation of an underclass of “users,” and AI’s seamless efficiency is seen as a heavily privatized, if not secreted, backdrop of unseen power, first, in her brief visit to a once-lush living lake sucked dry by the lust for lithium, a rare...
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June 2022
May 26 2022
Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence
Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence
by Kate
Crawford
. Yale University Press
, New Haven, CT, U.S.A.
, 2021
. 336 pp., illus. Trade. ISBN-10: 0300209576
Molly Hankwitz
Online ISSN: 1530-9282
Print ISSN: 0024-094X
©2022 ISAST
2022
ISAST
Leonardo (2022) 55 (3): 311–313.
Citation
Molly Hankwitz; Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Leonardo 2022; 55 (3): 311–313. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02206
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