Kate Crawford
AI Researcher & Author
Scholar of AI’s social and political costs and author of “Atlas of AI” (2021), which recasts machine learning as an extractive industry — burning through minerals, energy, hidden labor and scraped data — rather than a bloodless feat of software.
In her words
AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is made from natural resources and it is people who are performing the tasks to make the systems appear autonomous.
When you have these huge ambitions to capture and contain the entire world, it is driven by this extractive impulse to get as much data as possible, at any cost.
Biography
Kate Crawford (born 1970) is an Australian-born scholar of the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. A research professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research, she has spent more than a decade studying AI not as abstract code but as a physical, political system — and became one of its most influential critics with her 2021 book “Atlas of AI.”
The extractive anatomy of AI
In “Atlas of AI,” Crawford traces the mineral mines, data-labeling sweatshops, energy-hungry data centers and mass-scraped datasets that underwrite modern machine learning. Her argument is that the industry’s language of automation hides an enormous chain of human labor and environmental cost — that a simple voice command sets off “a chain of extraction which reaches all around the planet.”
AI extracts data, but it also extracts labour, time and untold quantities of natural resources to build and power the vast banks of computers that keep it running.
Crawford’s critique is structural rather than apocalyptic: she is less worried about superintelligence than about the concentrations of power, opacity and ecological toll of the systems being built today. Her earlier work co-founded the AI Now Institute and helped push algorithmic accountability into mainstream policy debate, making her a defining voice for those who read AI as an extension of industrial capitalism.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/kate-crawford