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

by Kate Crawford

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Kate Crawford argues that AI is neither artificial nor intelligent but rather a planetary-scale extractive industry built on mineral mining, underpaid data labor, and massive datasets harvested from people without meaningful consent. Through chapters organised around earth, labor, data, classification, affect, and state power, she maps the material supply chains and political structures that make AI systems possible and shows how they concentrate power.

Published:: 2021
Pages:: 336

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In the Conversation

In this collection, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence references 4 other books.

It draws on The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Invisible Women and The Sixth Extinction.

Scroll down to read the exact passages where other authors reference this book and what they say about it.

What This Book Draws On

The books Crawford references and why each one mattered to the argument.

Crawford builds directly on Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism framework of behavioural surplus extraction, extending the analysis beyond private companies to show how state actors leverage the same data asymmetries for control

References

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

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Engages with Criado Perez's Invisible Women argument about data gaps to demonstrate how AI training datasets systematically underrepresent women and marginalized groups, producing classification systems that encode exclusion

References

Invisible Women

by Caroline Criado Perez

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References Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction when discussing the environmental costs of AI, connecting the mineral extraction required for computing hardware to planetary ecological destruction

References

The Sixth Extinction

by Elizabeth Kolbert

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Draws on Mazzucato's The Entrepreneurial State thesis to critique the myth that AI innovation is purely private-sector driven, showing how public research funding and military contracts underpin the industry