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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