Meet the Authors Series: Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence
Prof. Kate Crawford will be discussing the themes of her book, "The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence" which explore the hidden costs of artificial intelligence, from natural resources and energy to labor and data, and reveals how AI systems have saturated political life and depleted the planet. The talk will be an opportunity to hear how artificial intelligence already permeates many aspects of our lives and ecologies in ways that are widening power asymmetries across the world. "The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence" is the winner of the ASIS&T Best Information Science Book Award of 2022.
Presenters
Professor Kate Crawford is a leading international scholar of the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. Her work focuses on understanding large-scale data systems in the wider contexts of history, politics, labor, and the environment. She is a Research Professor of Communication and STS at USC Annenberg, a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New York, and an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney. She is the inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where she co-leads the international working group on the Foundations of Machine Learning. Over her twenty year research career, she has also produced groundbreaking creative collaborations and visual investigations. Her project Anatomy of an AI System with Vladan Joler won the Beazley Design of the Year Award, and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the V&A in London. Her collaboration with the artist Trevor Paglen produced Training Humans – the first major exhibition of the images used to train AI systems. Their investigative project, Excavating AI, won the Ayrton Prize from the British Society for the History of Science. Crawford's latest book, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (Yale University Press) has been described as “trenchant” by the New York Review of Books, “a fascinating history of data” by the New Yorker, a “timely and urgent contribution” by Science. and named one of the best books on technology in 2021 by the Financial Times.