Book Club: Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence

This month’s selection, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford highlights the political, ethical and environmental costs of using artificial intelligence and the power of algorithmic bias. A leading international scholar of the social implications of artificial intelligence, Crawford showcases the power of AI to widen inequity and narrow divergent political ideologies.

Professor Kate Crawford is a leading international scholar of the social implications of artificial intelligence. She is a research professor at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles, a senior principal researcher at MSR in New York, an honorary professor at the University of Sydney, and the inaugural visiting chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

Her latest book, Atlas of AI (Yale, 2021) won the Sally Hacker Prize from the Society for the History of Technology, the ASIS&T Best Information Science Book Award, and was named one of the best books in 2021 by New Scientist and the Financial Times. She has advised policy makers in the United Nations, the White House, and the European Parliament, and she currently leads the Knowing Machines Project, an international research collaboration that investigates the foundations of machine learning. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in AI in the 2023 TIME 100/AI list.