Atlas of AI Book Launch: Kate Crawford & Trevor Paglen In Conversation

Gray Area in conjunction with City Lights Booksellers and Yale University Press present Kate Crawford in conversation with Trevor Paglen, celebrating the launch of Kate Crawford's new book Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence published by Yale University Press. The Atlas of AI explores the hidden costs of artificial intelligence, from natural resources and labor to privacy, equality, and freedom. What happens when artificial intelligence saturates political life and depletes the planet? How is AI shaping our understanding of ourselves and our societies? In this book Kate Crawford reveals how this planetary network is fueling a shift toward undemocratic governance and increased racial, gender, and economic inequality. Drawing on more than a decade of research, award-winning science, and technology, Crawford reveals how AI is a technology of extraction: from the energy and minerals needed to build and sustain its infrastructure, to the exploited workers behind "automated" services, to the data AI collects from us. Rather than taking a narrow focus on code and algorithms, Crawford offers us a political and a material perspective on what it takes to make artificial intelligence and where it goes wrong. While technical systems present a veneer of objectivity, they are always systems of power. This is an urgent account of what is at stake as technology companies use artificial intelligence to reshape the world.