Kate Crawford's "Atlas of AI" is a masterwork in technological thinking. Rarely do I find a thinking alignment regarding the brain model as a narrow definition of intelligence [Human AI]. However, this is the first time, I have seen someone reflecting on media as a geological process, which indirectly questions the foundational assumption about information [The Conceptual Age], what it is, and what it should be.
Kate brilliantly explains the conveniently forgotten E, S, and G in AI, and why AI is and will continue to be riddled with biases and erroneous expressions. If AI has such data limitations in the modern non-financial world, you can only imagine the magnitude of failure it's baking in if it ever becomes mainstream in capital markets.
I enjoyed the book. Hope you will pick it up and give it a serious thought.
Incorrect belief that "Human-like intelligence can be created from scratch."
"Intelligence is something that exists independently, as though it was natural and distinct from social, cultural, historical, and philosophical forces."
"The concept of intelligence has done in-ordinate harm over centuries."
“Perverse grand fantasy” that AI scientists could create a machine that learns “like a child does”
Hubert Dreyfus argued back, concerned that the engineers “do not even consider the possibility that the brain might process information in an entirely different way than a computer.”
Ellen Ullman - this belief that the mind is like a computer and vice versa has “infected decades of thinking in the computer and cognitive sciences”, creating a kind of original sin for the field.
"Viewing Artificial intelligence as an extractive industry."
"AI raises profound ethical, methodological, and epistemological concerns."
"Thinking of San Francisco skyscrapers as inverted minescapes"
"Tesla is estimated to use twenty - eight thousand tons of Lithium hydroxide annually - half of the planet’s total consumption - Tesla is more accurately described as a battery business than a car company."
"Reflecting on media and technology as a geological process enables us to consider the radical depletion of nonrenewable resources required to drive the technologies of the present moment."
"The obsolescence cycle. The e-waste burial grounds of Ghana and Pakistan...the wastes of Baotou [Mongolia] we want to forget."
"AI extracts far more from us and the planet that is widely known."
"The twenty-three minerals that are at high supply risk to manufacturers, meaning that if they would become unavailable - entire industries - including the tech sector - would grind to a halt."
"The conflict-free certifications [minerals extracted from conflict zones] of the tech industry are now under question."
"99.8 percent of earth removed in rare earth mining is discarded as waste, called ‘tailings’ that are dumbed back into hills and streams, creating new pollutants like ammonium."
"The Victorian environmental disaster of gutta-percha at the dawn of the global information society shows how the relations between technology and its materials, environments, and labor practices are interwoven."
"A single NLP model produced more than 660,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, the equivalent of five gas-powered cars over their total lifetime or 125 round-trip flights from New York to Beijing."
"The data economy is premised on maintaining environmental ignorance."
"The compute maximalism has profound ecological impacts."
"China’s data center industry draws 73 percent of its power from coal, emitting about 99 million tons of CO2 in 2018."
"Sea blindness - One container ship is estimated to emit as much pollution as fifty million cars and sixty thousand deaths every year are attributed indirectly to cargo ship industry pollution."
"Artificial intelligence is another kind of megamachine, a set of technological approaches that depend on industrial infrastructures, supply chains, and human labor that stretch around the globe but are kept pace."
"X.ai...faking AI, an exhausting job."
"The myth of AI as affordable and efficient depends on layers of exploitation, including the extraction of mass unpaid labor to fine-tune the AI systems of the richest companies on earth."
Marx’s description of clock time. “Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at most, time’s carcass.”
"The unswerving belief that everything is data and it is there for the taking...There is no data, like more data...The pillaging began in earnest...data started to be viewed as capital."
"The great majority of university-based AI research is done without any ethical review process."
"The Michigan Integrated Data Automated System [MiDAS] inaccurately identified more than forty thousand Michigan residents of suspected fraud. The consequences were sever: Seizure of tax refunds, garnishment of wages, and imposition of civil penalties that were four times the amount people were accused of owing."
“Once rockets are up, who cares where they come down?”
"The AI Industry has traditionally understood the problem of bias as though it is a bug to be fixed rather than a feature of classification itself."
"The result is a statistical ouroboros; a self-reinforcing discrimination machine that amplifies social inequalities under the guise of technical neutrality."
"Dangerously reductive categorization...from the start, the methodology had problems...desire to oversimplify what is stubbornly complex."
“The algorithm told me to do it, so I did, I had no idea what I was doing.”