5 Questions with Kate Crawford, author of Atlas of AI
Kate Crawford is a leading scholar of the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She is a research professor at USC Annenberg, a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research, and the inaugural chair of AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
Katie Crawford will be discussing her new book, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (published by Yale University Press) with Trevor Paglen in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on Friday April 30th, presented with Gray Area!
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Where are you writing to us from?
Sydney, Australia. I normally live in New York, so visiting here is like being in a parallel universe where COVID-19 was taken seriously from the beginning and history played out differently.
What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?
Cooking through every cookbook I own, talking to good friends, listening to records, and trying to improve my sub-par surfing skills.
What books are you reading right now? Which books do you return to?
Right now I’m reading Jer Thorp’s Living in Data: Citizen's Guide to a Better Information Future, the excellent collection Your Computer is On Fire from the MIT Press, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, and The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. Yes, I have a problem - I never just read one book at a time.
In terms of books that I return to, there's a long list. Here’s just a few:
- Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star's Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences
- Ursula M. Franklin's The Real World of Technology
- Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
- James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
- Gray Brechin’s Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin
- Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower
- Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's Objectivity
- Oscar H. Gandy’s The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information. Critical Studies in Communication and in the Cultural Industries - such a prescient book about classification, discrimination and technology, published back in 1993!
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
Atlas of AI was influenced by so many writers and artists, across different centuries - from Georgius Agricola to Jorge Luis Borges to Margaret Mead. More recently, there’s been an extraordinary set of books published on the politics of technology in just the last five years. For example:
- Meredith Broussard’s Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
- Ruha Benjmain’s Race After Technology
- Julie E. Cohen’s Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism
- Sasha Costanza-Chock’s Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need
- Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein’s Data Feminism
- Virginia Eubanks’ Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor
- Tarleton Gillespie’s Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media
- Sarah T Roberts’ Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media
- Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
- Tung-Hui Hu’s A Prehistory of the Cloud
And that’s just for starters - it’s an incredible time for books that make us contend with the consequences of the technologies we use every day.
I’m also influenced by the artists I’ve had the privilege of working with over the years, including Trevor Paglen, Vladan Joler, and Heather Dewey-Hagborg. Vladan and I collaborated on Anatomy of an AI System a few years ago, and he designed the cover and illustrations in Atlas of AI, which I love.
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
This may not be the most practical choice, but I’d open a library for rare and antiquarian books near Mono Lake. I’d call it Labyrinths, after Borges’ infinite library of volumes. One of its treasures would be a copy of John Wilkins’ An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668), where Wilkins tries to create a classification scheme for every possible thing and notion in the universe. It would be a cryptic joke for the occasional passer-by.
