Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence
by Kate Crawford
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Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence:
In one case, Amazon negotiated a memorandum of understanding with a police department in Florida, discovered through a public records request filed by journalist Caroline Haskins, which showed that police were incentivized to promote the Neighbors app and for every qualifying download they would receive credits toward free Ring cameras. The result was a “self-perpetuating surveillance network: more people download Neighbors, more people get Ring, surveillance footage proliferates, and police can request whatever they want,” Haskins writes. Surveillance capacities that were once ruled over by courts are now on offer in Apple’s App Store and promoted by local street cops. As media scholar Tung-Hui Hu observes, by using such apps, we “become freelancers for the state’s security apparatus.
From the perspective of deep time, we are extracting Earth's geological history to serve a split second of contemporary technological time, building devices like the Amazon Echo and iPhone that are often designed to last for only a few years.
Controlling time — whether via the clocks for churches, trains or data centers — has always been a function of controlling the political order.
It is a common practice of life to focus on the world immediately before us, the one we see and smell and touch every day. It grounds us where we are, with our communities and our known corners and concerns. But to see the full supply chains of Al requires looking for patterns in a global sweep, a sensitivity to the ways in which the histories and specific harms are different from place to place and yet are deeply interconnected by the multiple forces of extraction.
To suggest that we democratize Al to reduce asymmetries of power is a little like arguing for democratizing weapons manufacturing in the service of peace. As Audre Lorde reminds us, the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
La fauxtomatización no remplaza directamente la mano de obra humana. Más bien la reubica y dispersa en el espacio y el tiempo. Al hacerlo, aumenta la desconexión entre la mano de obra y el valor, cumpliendo de este modo con una función ideológica
Ultimately, 'data' has become a bloodless word; it disguises both its material origins and its ends. And if data is seen as abstract and immaterial, then it more easily falls outside of traditional understandings and responsibilities of care, consent, or risk.
Over and over, we see the ideology of Cartesian dualism in AI: the fantasy that Al systems are disembodied brains that absorb and produce knowledge independently from their creators, infrastructures, and the world at large. These illusions distract from the far more relevant questions: Whom do these systems serve? What are the political economies of their construction? And what are the wider planetary consequences?
What epistemological violence is necessary to make the world readable to a machine learning system? AI seeks to systematize the unsystematizable, formalize the social, and convert an infinitely complex and changing universe into a Linnaean order of machine-readable tables. Many of AI’s achievements have depended on boiling things down to a terse set of formalisms based on proxies: identifying and naming some features while ignoring or obscuring countless others. To adapt a phrase from philosopher Babette Babich, machine learning exploits what it does know to predict what it does not know: a game of repeated approximations. Datasets are also proxies—stand-ins for what they claim to measure. Put simply, this is transmuting difference into computable sameness.
It’s that the NIST databases foreshadow the emergence of a logic that has now thoroughly pervaded the tech sector: the unswerving belief that everything is data and is there for the taking. It doesn’t matter where a photograph was taken or whether it reflects a moment of vulnerability or pain or if it represents a form of shaming the subject. It has become so normalized across the industry to take and use whatever is available that few stop to question the underlying politics.
