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The Atlas of AI

Three-Sentence Summary

"The Atlas of AI" uncovers the real world impact of artificial intelligence, beyond its digital interface, including environmental damage, labor exploitation and data bias.
Kate Crawford delves into the materials required to build AI technologies, their toll on the environment and the power structures that drive this industry.
She advocates for a more holistic understanding and regulation of artificial intelligence that considers human rights, democratic values and environmental sustainability.

Extended Summary

"The Atlas of AI" by Kate Crawford is an insightful exploration into the often overlooked physical realities and impacts of artificial intelligence (AI). The book takes readers on a journey from mines that produce minerals for AI technology, factory floors where these devices are assembled by exploited workers, to the data centers that store our information.

Crawford offers an in-depth look at how AI technologies are far from ethereal or neutral but are rooted in real-world complexities. The author underscores how these technologies are forged from natural resources which have severe ecological implications due to destructive mining practices and energy consumption during production.

She also highlights how vast amounts of personal data needed to train these systems can lead to privacy infringements and reinforce systemic biases. The book reveals how power structures control and benefit from these processes while perpetuating inequality.

Instead of preaching doom or blindly championing progress, Crawford proposes a balanced approach that questions assumptions about AI's neutrality and universality. She calls for stricter regulations on data collection, acknowledging workers' rights in the tech industry, mitigating environmental impact, and developing more ethical algorithms.

Key Points

AI technologies have tangible physical realities with significant environmental implications due to resource extraction and energy consumption.
The development and deployment of AI can perpetuate inequalities through exploitative labor practices in tech manufacturing sectors and biased algorithms.
A balanced approach is necessary to regulate AI technologies, considering human rights, environmental sustainability, and ethical implications of data collection and algorithm design.

Who Should Read

"The Atlas of AI" is compelling for anyone interested in the wider impacts of artificial intelligence. It is particularly valuable for tech enthusiasts, policymakers, environmentalists and human rights advocates seeking a more comprehensive understanding of the AI industry beyond its digital façade.

About the Author

Kate Crawford is a leading scholar on the social implications of artificial intelligence. She is a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, the inaugural chair of AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure, and an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney.

Readwise Highlights

the relationship between desire, illusion, and action, the business of spectacles, how we anthropomorphize the nonhuman, how biases emerge, and the politics of intelligence. Location 59
The story of Hans is now used in machine learning as a cautionary reminder that you can’t always be sure of what a model has learned Location 63
How is intelligence “made,” and what traps can that create? Location 66
The first myth is that nonhuman systems (be it computers or horses) are analogues for human minds. This perspective assumes that with sufficient training, or enough resources, humanlike intelligence can be created from scratch, without addressing the fundamental ways in which humans are embodied, relational, and set within wider ecologies. Location 72
intelligence is something that exists independently, Location 75
as though it were natural and distinct from social, cultural, historical, and political forces. Location 75
drove the “perverse grand fantasy” that AI scientists could create a machine that learns “as a child does.” Location 87
There were simply some complicated human tasks that would take more time to be formalized and solved by machines.12 Location 92
less formal aspects of intelligence must be abstracted, eliminated, or approximated for computers, leaving them unable to process information about situations as humans do. Location 98
As author and engineer Ellen Ullman puts it, this belief that the mind is like a computer, and vice versa, has “infected decades of thinking in the computer and cognitive sciences,” creating a kind of original sin for the field. Location 106
Professor Donald Michie described AI as knowledge refining, where “a reliability and competence of codification can be produced which far surpasses the highest level that the unaided human expert has ever, perhaps even could ever, attain.” Location 114
Each way of defining artificial intelligence is doing work, setting a frame for how it will be understood, measured, valued, and governed. Location 119
In contrast, in this book I argue that AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. Rather, artificial intelligence is both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labor, infrastructures, logistics, histories, and classifications. Location 124
AI systems are ultimately designed to serve existing dominant interests. In this sense, artificial intelligence is a registry of power. Location 129
AI is technical and social practices, institutions and infrastructures, politics and culture. Location 132
To understand how AI is fundamentally political, we need to go beyond neural nets and statistical pattern recognition to instead ask what is being optimized, and for whom, and who gets to decide. Location 142
Then we can trace the implications of those choices. Location 144
Seeing AI Like an Atlas Location 145
An atlas presents you with a particular viewpoint of the world, with the imprimatur of science—scales and ratios, latitudes and longitudes—and a sense of form and consistency. Location 150
an atlas is as much an act of creativity—a subjective, political, and aesthetic intervention—as it is a scientific collection. Location 151
atlas offers us the possibility of rereading the world, linking disparate pieces differently and “reediting and piecing it together again without thinking we are summarizing or exhausting it.” Location 155
“Maps represent purposeful endeavors: they are meant to be useful, to assist the traveler and bridge the gap between the known and the as yet unknown; they are testaments of collective knowledge and insight.” Location 158
need new ways to understand the empires of artificial intelligence. Location 163
We need a theory of AI that accounts for the states and corporations that drive and dominate it, the extractive mining that leaves an imprint on the planet, the mass capture of data, and the profoundly unequal and increasingly exploitative labor practices that sustain it. Location 163
This colonizing impulse centralizes power in the AI field: it determines how the world is measured and defined while simultaneously denying that this is an inherently political activity. Location 176
an expanded view of artificial intelligence as an extractive industry. Location 218
sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina calls the “epistemic machinery.” Location 244
how artificial intelligence functions as a structure of power that combines infrastructure, capital, and labor. From the Uber driver being nudged to the undocumented immigrant being tracked to the public housing tenants contending with facial recognition systems in their homes, AI systems are built with the logics of capital, policing, and militarization—and this combination further widens the existing asymmetries of power. Location 261
Artificial intelligence, then, is an idea, an infrastructure, an industry, a form of exercising power, and a way of seeing; it’s also a manifestation of highly organized capital backed by vast systems of extraction and logistics, with supply chains that wrap around the entire planet. Location 269
The task is to remain sensitive to the terrain and to watch the shifting and plastic meanings of the term “artificial intelligence”—like a container into which various things are placed and then removed—because that, too, is part of the story. Location 280
This is why we must contend with AI as a political, economic, cultural, and scientific force. As Alondra Nelson, Thuy Linh Tu, and Alicia Headlam Hines observe, “Contests around technology are always linked to larger struggles for economic mobility, political maneuvering, and community building.”36 Location 290