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

"For a more critical and thought-provoking perspective, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (2021) by Kate Crawford delves into the less-discussed consequences of AI development, such as environmental impact, data labor, and the power dynamics behind AI technologies. It’s an essential read for understanding the broader implications of AI beyond its technical advancements. These two books offer a well-rounded view of AI, covering both its transformative potential and the critical challenges it poses. As of my last update in April 2023, there isn’t a specific book that stands out as the definitive resource solely on Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-3 or GPT-4. However, the field is rapidly evolving, and new publications are likely to emerge. [End of our 2023 update. The original 2022 interview appears below] ___________________________ Certainly! Artificial intelligence (AI) is the ability of computers and other machines to perform tasks that would normally require human intelligence, such as understanding language, recognizing images, making decisions, and solving problems. There are many different types of AI, including narrow or weak AI, which is designed to perform a specific task, and general or strong AI, which is designed to be capable of performing any intellectual task that a human can. One of the main goals of AI research is to create systems that can perform tasks without explicit instructions. To achieve this, AI systems are often designed to learn from data , using techniques from machine learning. Machine learning is a type of AI that allows systems to improve their performance on a particular task over time by learning from data, rather than being explicitly programmed. AI has the potential to revolutionize many industries and change the way we live and work. Some possible applications of AI include autonomous vehicles, medical diagnosis, language translation, and financial trading. The development of AI has also raised a number of ethical and philosophical questions , such as whether it is possible to create machines that are truly intelligent and whether the increasing reliance on AI will lead to a loss of jobs for humans. My recommendations were based on the popularity and critical acclaim of the books, as well as their ability to provide a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the field of AI. These books are considered classic works in the field and are often used as textbooks or recommended reading in university courses on AI. They cover a range of topics, including machine learning, natural language processing, and the ethical and philosophical implications of AI. I hope this helps to clarify my selection criteria. My list includes a mix of popular books on AI as well as textbooks. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvi g is a widely used textbook in university courses on AI, while The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom are more accessible and popular works that discuss the potential impact of AI on society and the ethical considerations surrounding its development."

"Kate is a wonderful academic, really brilliant, and she has taken a look at the technology of artificial intelligence . In her view, it’s neither artificial nor particularly intelligent. Its use often masks a set of industrial processes and complex supply chains that bury within them deep inequalities and disparities in power. “We’ll always be a high tech society because we can’t put the genie back in the bottle” What she aims to do in the book is use this structural and political analysis to bring to the fore what happens behind what we think of as the ‘magic’ of our phones opening up when they see our faces. An example of that in Kate’s book is that a lot of the AI systems that we use today have required these systems to be trained by humans. The humans who do the training are often in emerging markets or poor economies, not being paid very well to go through the slightly mind-numbing task of training a machine to recognise what a dog is, and what a cat is. That’s just one example that she brings up. I found the book really thought-provoking and challenging—although I don’t agree with every part of her analysis. In the explanation of the symptoms, she also talks about the way in which those symptoms emerge. From that, you can see what types of policies you could enact to address them. But I think a large part of this is about transparency, and letting people be aware of how their products get to their table. One of the things that Kate identifies for us is something that we’ve become very easy with—how other products get to us. For example, when we have a hamburger delivered at home on a weekend, we never give a moment’s thought as to how that was produced and delivered from farm to plate. AI is often presented, in Kate’s view, as a magical technology. Her point is that, actually, behind it are a lot of structures of labour and resource extraction and resource use and power disparity that perhaps we should think about."

"I’ve deliberately chosen books that are looking at quite different aspects of AI because one of the questions is what we even mean by AI. How do we think about it? How do we conceptualize it and what it is? Then there are particular questions about the minutiae of how the technology works. One of the things I really like about Kate Crawford’s book is that she’s looking critically at the way the entire system of AI works and the impact of AI on a global scale. So we can think about AI just in terms of the software, what it’s capable of doing. That’s one element of it. But AI is not just software floating around in the ether, it’s actually manifest in hardware, in technology, in data banks, and also in a massive amount of human labor around the world. She looks at questions like mining and workers employed in terrible conditions for very little money. She also looks at the whole ideology behind AI and technology. Notions of efficiency that might be applied to machines, are now coming into the workforce. There are questions about surveillance of workers and concern about how employees at places like Amazon and Uber, but also elsewhere, are being tracked. It’s technology that is enabling us to do it. A lot of that technology is not AI, per se. It’s not a super intelligence. But it is the logic of the technology, the idea that we have to increase outputs and efficiency. Workers are being treated like machines. She’s focused on trying to understand and analyze the issues, so that people really understand the questions. Also, the depth of the problem. One of the main reasons why AI has developed so fast in recent years is because it relies upon masses and masses of data. There’s now an unbelievable amount of data available and it’s being collected all the time. She looks at the assumptions driving it. Can we simply understand the material world around us through data? Can we really understand human beings through data? What is it to be a human being just understood through data that’s being collected around us? So those are issues I think are really important to understand and how they’re embedded into the technology. Also, any philosophers interested in this will see immediately that collecting data assumes a process of classifying the world. You’re classifying the data in certain ways. That raises powerful issues about how we’re even being seen. She’s also got a chapter looking at affect. This is about using AI to detect our emotions, and then maybe also to manipulate them. That is based on work about how we can interpret human emotions which has also come under considerable critique. The subtitle is ‘Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence.’ One of the things I like about it is that it’s very readable. She tells stories about how she drove to this place out in the middle of a desert where there are data centers. She’s taking you on journeys to different places around the world and within workplaces. In a sense, it’s really heavy reading, because it’s serious stuff, but it’s easy to read. She makes it really accessible."