Collaborative Book Review 2024 | “The Atlas of AI”

The HASTAC Scholars’ Collaborative Book Review Project has started reviewing two books this round,  “Data Feminism” by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein and “Atlas of AI” by Kate Crawford. This initiative offers a platform for academic exploration and nurturing critical writing and peer review skills, promising an enriching community of discourse. The two books we have suggested for review this year offer an original approach by decentering a bit of questions of innovation or ethics and diving deep into the new power geometries behind technology. The Atlas of AI, by Kate Crawford, analyzes brilliantly the geopolitics and political ecology sustaining AI around the world

The HASTAC Scholars’ Collaborative Book Review Project is both an academic endeavor and a participatory forum fostering critical engagement and reflection. Each HASTAC scholar engaged in the exercise will review a specific chapter of the book, which a peer will read and review before being finalized. This process, alternating individual and collective moments, creates an in-depth reflection and dialogue on the topic as each scholar interprets and focuses on aspects influenced by their own work and discipline. The final result, an exhaustive review chapter by chapter, is hence collaborative, interdisciplinary, and fundamentally innovative.

The contributing authors to this collection are (in alphabetical order) Stella Fritzell, Hannah Mendro, Kelsey Moore, Sharon Musa, Andi Sciacca, Rebecca Stuch, and Ian Williams.

In the Atlas of AI, Kate Crawford seizes the cloud and its data and grounds it in physical and concrete material realities. While the author was already at the forefront of the critics towards the supposed neutrality of digital technology, this time, she takes us on a trip to observe the extractive processes at play behind the technology. By doing so, she makes visible the socially and environmentally destructive infrastructure sustaining the current AI fever. Taking the reader to contaminated landscapes of lithium mines, inside Amazon’s gigantic warehouses, or within the intimate spaces in which we produce data daily, the author shifts the analysis from ethereal ethics to the very spatial extractive aspects of AI, which turns out to be way less artificial than what the great Silicon Valley gurus’ promote. It is through the overexploitation of lithium in Nevada, Bolivia, or Congo, the undignifying labor and biased classification of data, and the externalization of technological waste to South East Asia that AI is built. Shifting away from the promises of solving all our problems in the future, Crawford invites us to pay attention to the present costs of AI at different scales and around the globe, creating a provocative Atlas. As a geographer, her work brings to my mind the concept of spatio-temporal fix elaborated by David Harvey as an analysis of how capitalism constantly produces and destroys new spaces to sustain its constant need for expansion. The book is an excellent call to pay attention to the natural and human infrastructure required for AI to progress. It analyzes how it reinforces the logic of uneven development through new territorial power dynamics. In that sense, it demands us to question the accelerated development of AI and think about how we shape a technology without further damaging our future possibilities to live well. It also opens a path to imagine a different AI that is more ethical and just but less extractive and offers improvement possibilities for all territories.

Kate Crawford is a scholar and writer who studies machine learning, AI, and data systems from the critical standpoint of their social, political, and human impacts. Her artistic project, Anatomy of an AI System with Vladan Joler, is part of the permanent collection of MOMA New York.

The book was recommended to the team by a HASTAC Scholar alumni, Marisol Gonzalez, current Secretary of Technological Transfer at the National University of Rosario,  who participated in the collaborative book review on Design Justice by Sasha Constanza-Chock in 22-23.