Atlas of AI

Kate Crawford is a leading scholar of the social implications of AI. She is a research professor at USC Annenberg, a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research, and the inaugural chair of AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure.

“This study argues that [artificial intelligence] is neither artificial nor particularly intelligent. . . . A fascinating history of the data on which machine-learning systems are trained.”—New Yorker“Crawford argues passionately that while AI is presented as disembodied, objective and inevitable, it is material, biased and subject to our own outlooks and ideologies.”—David A. Shaywitz, Wall Street Journal“As Kate Crawford’s trenchant Atlas of AI demonstrates again and again, artificial intelligence does not come to us as a deus ex machina but, rather, through a number of dehumanizing extractive practices, of which most of us are unaware.“—Sue Halpern, New York Review of BooksNamed one of the “Five Best Books to Read to Get Smart about AI” by the Wall Street Journal“One of the world’s most thoughtful researchers on the impact of AI delivers a sobering, but essential, read about how AI is accelerating undemocratic governance and increased inequality.”—John Thornhill, Financial Times, Best Books of 2021“Well-researched, well-written, and enlightening.”—Terry Freedman, Teach Secondary“Crawford brings the reader on a global journey to places and interventions which have historically played, and continue to play, a key function in developing and maintaining the machinery of artificial intelligence. With a variety of well-illustrated descriptions of environmentally hazardous industries, exploitation of human labour, the origin of deeply biased data sets, and methods of classification, Crawford assists the reader in seeing through the myth of AI.”—Lina Olsson, Metascience“Atlas of AI is the perfect medium to begin to understand AI. Crawford wisely avoids any form of jargon and her message comes across clear and loud. The book also contains a wide array of notes and references which the more experienced readers will find very useful to go deeper into the several themes that Crawford’s atlas illustrates, but also to find new directions for future research.”—Federico Cugurullo, TechnoscienzaCHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles 2021Winner of the 2022 Sally Hacker Prize, sponsored by the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT)Winner of the 2022 Best Information Science Book of the Year Award, sponsored by ASIS&T“A must read. Moving from lithium mines to data extraction, from labor exploitation to government surveillance, Atlas of AI eloquently reveals how intelligence is ‘made.’ It displaces anemic calls for ‘ethics’ with probing investigations into the environmental degradation, capital accumulation, and labor conditions that AI make possible.”—Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, SFU’s Canada 150 Chair in New Media“It’s a masterpiece, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.”—Karen Hao, senior editor, MIT Tech Review“In this eloquent and revelatory survey, Crawford limns the dire stakes of unbridled technological expansion. Methodologically original and keenly intelligent, Atlas of AI is an indispensable map of the present that boldly calls readers to chart a more just and sustainable future.”—Alondra Nelson, president, Social Science Research Council“Eloquent, clear and profound—this 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“By brilliantly tracing the history, mythology, ethics and politics of artificial intelligence, Atlas of AI reminds us that the stories we tell about AI are just as vital as the mathematical models that comprise these systems.”—Ruha Benjamin, author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code