Atlas of AI | Kate Crawford

Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence

Extended Synopsis

What happens when artificial intelligence saturates political life and depletes the planet? How is AI shaping our understanding of ourselves and our societies? Drawing on more than a decade of research, award-winning scholar Kate Crawford reveals how AI is a technology of extraction: from the minerals drawn from the earth to the labor pulled from low-wage information workers to the data taken from every action and expression.

Crawford reveals how this planetary network is fueling a shift toward undemocratic governance and increased inequity. Rather than taking a narrow focus on code and algorithms, Crawford offers us a material and political perspective on what it takes to make AI and how it centralizes power. This is an urgent account of what is at stake as technology companies use artificial intelligence to reshape the world.

Author Biography

Kate Crawford is an Australian academic and award-winning scholar whose research focuses on the development, labor, and impact of artificial intelligence. Through a deep exploration of the intersection between technology, sociology, and political economy, Crawford sheds light on the material and human costs of modern technological advancement.

Reader Targeting

• Academics, researchers, and students in Technology Studies, Critical Theory, and Sociology.
• Professionals involved in Public Policy, Data Privacy, and Technology Ethics.
• Readers seeking a material, resource-based perspective on computational infrastructure.
• Advocates for democratic governance and corporate technological accountability.

Accolades & Critical Acclaim

• "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." —The New Yorker
• "A valuable corrective to much of the hype surrounding AI and a useful instruction manual for the future." —John Thornhill, Financial Times
• "It's a masterpiece, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it." —Karen Hao, senior editor, MIT Tech Review

Bibliographic & Physical Specifications

Frequently Asked Questions

What does the book mean by AI being a "technology of extraction"?
Kate Crawford argues that AI systems do not exist in a vacuum of pure code. Instead, they rely heavily on physical, material extraction: mining rare earth minerals from the planet, utilizing low-wage human labor to tag and sort data, and scraping massive amounts of personal expressions and actions without explicit consent.

Is this book highly technical or code-focused?
No, this treatise takes a tech-sociology and political economy approach. Rather than evaluating algorithms, it examines the political, material, social, and economic structures required to create and maintain global AI systems.

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