Atlas of AI, book review: Mapping out the total cost of artificial intelligence

“Check with forgiveness, not authorization” has prolonged been a guiding principle in Silicon Valley. There is no technological industry in which this principle has been far more practiced than the equipment mastering in fashionable AI, which relies upon for its existence on large databases, virtually all of which are scraped, copied, borrowed, begged, or stolen from the large piles of info we all emit everyday, knowingly or not. But this info is rarely ever rigorously sourced with the subjects’ authorization.  

“Mainly because we can,” two sociologists notify Kate Crawford in Atlas of AI: Electrical power, Politics, and the Planetary Fees of Artificial Intelligence, by way of acknowledging that their academic establishments are no diverse from technology corporations or governing administration agencies in concerning any info they locate as theirs for the having to coach and exam algorithms. Illustrations or photos turn out to be infrastructure. This is how equipment mastering is created. 

Everybody needs to speak about what AI is fantastic or risky for — determining facial illustrations or photos, decoding speech instructions, driving cars (not yet!). Quite a few want to pour ethics around today’s AI, as if making rules could alter the armed service funding that has outlined its essential character. Handful of want to go over AI’s genuine prices. Kate Crawford, a senior researcher at Microsoft and a research professor at the College of Southern California, is the exception. 

In Atlas of AI, Crawford starts by deconstructing the well known rivalry that ‘data is the new oil’. Typically, that sales opportunities people to speak about data’s economic price, but Crawford focuses on the actuality that each are extractive technologies. Extraction is mining (as in ‘data mining’ or oil wells), and the place mining goes, so follow environmental hurt, human exploitation, and profound culture-huge implications.  

Crawford underlines this place by heading to Silver Peak, Nevada, to stop by the only running lithium mine in the US. Lithium is, of training course, a vital component in battery packs for everything from smartphones to Teslas. Crawford follows this up by contemplating the widening implications of extraction for labour, the sources of info, classification algorithms, and the nation-condition conduct it all underpins, ending up with the electric power buildings enabled by AI-as-we-know-it. This way lies Project Maven and ‘signature strikes’ in which, as previous CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden admitted, metadata kills people. 

Snake oil

But some of this is patently phony. Crawford traces again the picture datasets on which the most up-to-date disturbing snake oil — emotion recognition — is primarily based, and finds they were created from posed pictures in which the topics were instructed to present exaggerated illustrations of emotional reactions. In this case, ‘AI’ is produced all the way down. Is there, as Tarleton Gillespie asked about Twitter trends, any actual human reflection there? 

Though other technology guides have tackled some of Crawford’s subjects (as well several of which have been reviewed right here to record), the closest to her integrated structural approach is The Fees of Connection by Nicholas Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, which sights our present technological reconfiguration as the beginnings of a new partnership among colonialism and capitalism. 

“Any sufficiently superior technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote. Next Crawford, this appears far more like: “Any technology that appears like magic is hiding a thing.” So several dim secrets lie in how the sausage is created. 

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