Atlas of AI

Kate Crawford argues that artificial intelligence is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is an extractive industry. The book follows the physical substrate first: the lithium mines, the data centres, the labelled datasets, the low-paid classification work, the energy. Then it turns to the politics, examining how classification systems encode assumptions about race, gender and emotion, and how AI concentrates power in a handful of firms and states. Based on years of fieldwork across mines, warehouses and laboratories.