Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford. Kate has a PhD from the University of Sydney. Kate is a research professor of communication at USC, senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research, 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. In 2021, she received the Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at the University of Melbourne.
Furthermore, Kate co-founded multiple interdisciplinary research groups including FATE at MSR, AI Now Institute at NYU, and Knowing Machines at USC. Kate has advised policy makers in the United Nations, the Federal Trade Commission, the European Parliament, the Australian Human Rights Commission, and the White House. Atlas of AI was named one of the best books on technology in 2021 by the Financial Times.
Kate is certainly delivering a powerful book addressing hidden costs of artificial intelligence. The list is rather lengthy, detailed and must not be overlooked. From natural resources, labor exploitation, failures of privacy in massive data collections, to undemocratic governance this is certainly eye opening. She is certainly revealing the cost of AI both upon the earth’s mining sites and factories, to snake oil salesmen exploiting workers in third world countries who ‘act as the ai’ in their products.
Digital Colonialism ?
A small group of companies are indeed serving the interests of the few at the expense of the world’s underprivileged. I was struck by her reference to AI as a new ‘digital colonialism’ in the opening chapter. Yet throughout the book Kate is proving this true, documenting the use of cheap labor to sustain AI services. This is also a topic within Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble.
In fact, Kate is displaying how AI can be viewed as a new system of power, moving well beyond any tough question regarding the lack of diverse training datasets. This is a much needed book for everyone seeks a real world understanding of the complexities facing the world today as we rush forward, driven by wall street into the next generation of life.
There has been a general failure to address the ways in which the instruments of knowledge in AI reflect and serve the incentives of a wider extractive economy. What remains is a persistent asymmetry of power, where technical systems maintain and extend structural inequality, regardless of the intention of the designers.
pgs. 174-175.
At times this will certainly be stunning for many reader. We laugh at the first time we hear “AI Hallucinations” and more often trust outcomes based upon “Deep Learning” when in fact, the data sets are certainly not equal. What happens to data accuracy when 90% of AI models reveal bias by reinforcing people as dataset objects used to train AI?
So, is your organization ready ?
In conclusion, Atlas of AI is one of the more powerful books I have read this year. It is simply a must read and has been highly recommended by many. Perhaps one of the most sobering detailed review of all things AI. Simply a must read.