num_pages: 288
description: The hidden costs of artificial intelligence from natural resources and labor to privacy equality and freedomEloquent clear and profoundthis volume is a classic for our times. It draws our attention away from the bright shiny objects of the new colonialism through elucidating the social material and political dimensions of Artificial Intelligence.Geoffrey C. Bowker University of California Irvine What happens when artificial intelligence saturates political life and depletes the planet? How is AI shaping our understanding of ourselves and our societies? In this book Kate Crawford reveals how this planetary network is fueling a shift toward undemocratic governance and increased racial gender and economic inequality. Drawing on more than a decade of research awardwinning science and technology Crawford reveals how AI is a technology of extraction: from the energy and minerals needed to build and sustain its infrastructure to the exploited workers behind automated services to the data AI collects from us. Rather than taking a narrow focus on code and algorithms Crawford offers us a political and a material perspective on what it takes to make artificial intelligence and where it goes wrong. While technical systems present a veneer of objectivity they are always systems of power. This is an urgent account of what is at stake as technology companies use artificial intelligence to reshape the world.
language: English
title: Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence
publisher: Yale University Press