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Atlas of AI (Kate Crawford)

Yale University Press · Crawford, K. · 2021

Key points

  1. Crawford maps AI's material and human costs, from mining and energy to low-wage data labour.
  2. It frames AI as extractive infrastructure rather than neutral computation, supplying a political-economy vocabulary for creative practice.
  3. It is among the most assigned critical-AI texts in art, design and media courses.

Summary

Kate Crawford's Atlas of AI (Yale University Press, 2021) maps the material and human costs underlying AI systems, tracing supply chains from rare-earth mining through energy-intensive data centres to the low-wage labour of data annotation. It frames AI as an extractive infrastructure rather than a neutral computational service, providing educators with a political-economy vocabulary for situating generative AI tools in their broader social and environmental context. The book is among the most widely assigned critical-AI texts in art, design, and media programs.

Source

Source: Yale University Press ↗ (Research)

Cite this item

Crawford, K. (2021). ‘Atlas of AI (Kate Crawford)’, Yale University Press. Available at: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300264630/atlas-of-ai/

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