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CRAWFORD, KATE 2021, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial 

Intelligence, New Haven: Yale University Press, 336 pp., ISBN 978-0-30026-463-0 

  

On March 22, 2023, The Future of Life Institute wrote an open letter to all the labs developing AI 

technologies and appealed to them to pause “giant AI experiments” for at least six months. The 

authors and signatories of the letter tell us that AI developing companies are locked in an endless 

race to develop new systems that no one, including their developers, understand. Nevertheless, the 

letter failed to raise fundamental questions about power and freedom concerning these AI 

technologies in our current moment. Just like human methods of governance and population 

control, AI assisted technologies are increasingly being used to surveil, contain, and profile 

vulnerable populations. Therefore, instead of solely focusing on potential threats to our liberty and 

autonomy in the future, it is necessary to critically evaluate the meaning of freedom and rights 

with regards to these technologies in the present.  

 

It is this orientation toward AI technologies that Kate Crawford’s book Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, 

and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence introduces us to at this epochal moment. The 

mainstream discourse about AI is surrounded and shrouded in enchantments; we know of AI 

systems as unknowable and beyond our comprehension, yet at the same time deterministic in a 

way that they surface patterns that can be applied with predictive certainty to shape everyday life. 

When we think about artificial intelligence as an omnipotent being devoid of any material context, 

it gives it a certain magical and theological quality. Crawford points to other unequal and material 

histories of AI that we have been led to forget due to “strategic amnesia” (26). Through this 

relational and material analysis of planetary computation, the book so cannily problematizes the 

conception of AI as intelligent and artificial; it is not artificial because it is made up from earth’s 



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deepest layers and neither is it intelligent because it is fed and trained on the data that humans 

produce. 

 

The Atlas of AI is a timely intervention in the emerging wave of socially attentive and critical 

scholarship in the Science and Technology Studies field. Crawford’s book compliments Safiya 

Nobel’s Algorithms of Oppression (2018), Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology (2019) and 

Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2020). All of these works challenge and 

unearth assumptions about AI as a neutral, equal and just technology and bring forward the 

discriminatory, unequal, and racist codification of social problems under modern computation. 

Crawford’s book differs from the aforementioned works because it points towards the planetary 

material infrastructures and labor that is required for modern computation and AI technologies to 

work on a global scale. 

 

With an interdisciplinary background in computer science and cultural studies, Crawford divides 

her book around the themes of “Earth,” “Labor,” “Classifications,” “State,” “Affect,” and 

“Power.” While the discussions in these chapters are historically informed, theoretically rich, and 

ethically attentive, the power of Crawford’s work lies in framing her chapters through her field 

journeys to multiple and disparate sites. These sites include warehouses, mines, government 

archives, immigration centers, police stations, and museums. By talking about mining of lithium 

that power computers and smartphones, the underpaid Mechanical Turk workers, who 

continuously build, maintain, and test AI systems through crowd work and the billions of dollars 

private and public investment into surveillance infrastructure, Crawford provides valuable insights 

into contemporary AI infrastructures’ material sites and political economy.  

 

Although atlases are colonial devices to school the eye and help empires intervene in contested 

spaces in order to draw borders directly, Crawford invokes the atlas to suggest “that we need new 

ways to understand the empires of AI” (10). In Chapter 1 “Earth,” by narrating her journey on a 

minivan from the heart of San Francisco to the mining sites of Clayton Valley in Nevada, where 

an “underground lake of lithium” now proffers “the stuff” of which AI “is made” (24–25), she 

documents the harmful environmental practices involved in the mining of lithium that powers 

computers on a global scale. Although these two spaces are geographically close, Crawford 



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forcefully illustrates how far apart they are regarding wealth. As the tech giants situated in San 

Francisco became more and more wealthy and the city a tourist attraction, people forgot that all of 

this would not have been possible without mining lithium and in return destroying ecologies and 

uprooting populations of Clayton valley.  

 

Through such journeys, Crawford rejects the dominant discourse about AI as an immaterial 

technology inhabiting the proverbial “cloud.” In this sense, AI is a registry of power (8), which 

continues to remap, contaminate, and uproot ecologies and communities by taking the form of 

“politics by other means” (20). From the lithium mining in Nevada required to power computation 

to the trees in Malaysia harvested to produce latex for the transatlantic undersea cables, 

fundamental to the planetary extraction which is required to power AI infrastructures is human 

labor. Thus Chapter 2 is focused on the brutal realities of mining and iPhone factory suicides from 

which we are so detached due to the spectacular display of endless software and hardware 

innovations. By documenting the strict work practices under the gaze of surveillance technologies 

in Amazon warehouses, Crawford brings forth the harsh labor conditions that are required to 

maintain “the myth of automation” (65). Detailed discussions about the theories of Jeremey 

Bentham, Charles Babbage, and Henry Ford in this chapter provides the necessary historical 

perspective regarding the management and disciplining of workers.  

 

Chapter 3, titled “Data,” elaborates how the unlimited collection and capturing of data without our 

informed consent to train AI systems on a planetary scale has become “moralized” (112) and it 

amounts to a “capture of the commons” (119). Though this chapter does an excellent job at 

introducing the readers to everyday data practices that we are part of, it is in no way a 

comprehensive take on the vast world of data that machine learning algorithms require.  

The subsequent two chapters on the atlas of AI deal with the classifications and affective 

technologies that this mass data makes possible. By analyzing mugshots from “Special Dataset 

32” and face recognition data, Crawford argues that these systems’ classifications and detections 

are not objective. These neutral technologies impose existing social orders and magnify 

inequalities. As AI systems require increased data for “learning” and as Big Tech companies push 

the logic of “bigger is better” (43) to increase their profits, the research field of AI has become 

strategically blind to ethical concerns.  



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The last node on the atlas of AI is “State.” In this chapter, Crawford takes us into the fascinating 

and horrifying world of AI under the command of the nation-state. By charting the history and 

evolution of public-private partnerships in the development of AI technologies, she maps out the 

geo-political landscape of the twentieth century and the genealogies of cyber warfare.  

 

In a powerfully written conclusion, Crawford says, “over and over, we see the ideology of 

Cartesian dualism in AI: the fantasy that AI systems are disembodied brains that absorb and 

produce knowledge independently from their creators, infrastructures, and the world at large. 

These illusions distract us from the more relevant questions: Whom do these systems serve? What 

are the political economies of their construction? Furthermore, what are the wider planetary 

consequences?” (215). At the core of Crawford’s book is a message that artificial intelligence is 

not an objective, universal, or neutral computational technique that makes determinations without 

human direction. Its systems are embedded in social, political, cultural, material and economic 

worlds, shaped by humans, institutions, and imperatives that determine what they do and how they 

do it. Chapters like “Classifications” show us that these technologies are designed to discriminate, 

to amplify hierarchies, and to encode narrow classifications. When applied in social contexts such 

as policing, the court system, health care, and education, they can reproduce, optimize, and amplify 

existing structural inequalities. This is no accident: AI systems are built to see and intervene in the 

world in ways that primarily benefit the states, institutions, and corporations that they serve. In 

this sense, AI systems are expressions of power that emerge from wider economic and political 

forces, created to increase profits and centralize control for those who wield them. 

 

Although Crawford never terms her disparate but connected fieldwork as ethnography, she 

explains it more in terms of journeys to various parts of the world that can unearth the material 

sites of AI. These journeys provide different nodes throughout the book on which we as 

anthropologists can expand and bring forward more locally specific and grounded ethnographies 

of AI and the various infrastructures associated with it to better understand the questions of power 

and discrimination that algorithms are perpetuating. For example, Vijayanka Nair’s An eye for an 

I: recording biometrics and reconsidering identity in postcolonial India (2018) and Ursula Rao’s 

Biometric Bodies, Or How to Make Electronic Fingerprinting Work in India (2018) around India’s 



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Biometric ID and Aadhaar scheme for welfare services bring forward the more intimate and micro 

effects that the interaction of AI assisted technologies and humans are producing. 

 

 

My name is Zahid Ali and I am a first year PhD student in the anthropology department of Rice 

University. My research questions lie at the intersection of the violent encounter between fossil 

fuel modernity and the desert life in Thar, Pakistan. Through ethnographic exploration, I aim to 

understand how mega development projects in the context of coal-powered energy 

infrastructures shape and reshape everyday life in the Thar desert. My focus is to study the ways 

in which the desert space is produced as a global resource for exploitation while simultaneously 

serving the dual purpose of entrenching state power and developmental regimes. 

 

 

 

© 2023 Zahid Ali 

 


