Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence
Summary
Maps AI as an extractive industry. It traces the earth (lithium and rare-earth mining, energy), labor (warehouse workers, clickworkers), data (scraped and taken without consent), and classification (systems that sort people) that AI depends on, and how state and corporate power shape it. Crawford argues that AI is “neither artificial nor intelligent”: it is made from natural resources, human labor, and political choices.
Why it’s useful here
- Supplies the material evidence behind Griziotti’s sections on hardware and ecological devastation.
- A strong argument for small, local models: every layer of the atlas is a centralized dependency.
- A useful structure for posts that ask “what is this tool made of?”
Key ideas
- AI as extractive infrastructure: earth, labor, data, classification, affect, state, power
- “Neither artificial nor intelligent”
- Classification as a political act
Related
- griziotti-2026-how-to-survive-artificial-intelligence.md
- pasquinelli-2023-eye-of-the-master.md