Kate Crawford

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: as she told the Guardian, asking a smart speaker to order toilet rolls “invokes into being this chain of extraction, which goes all around the planet.” She has kept pressing that case as generative AI scaled — a 2024 Nature comment argued that the industry’s energy and water use is being systematically hidden from the public.

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.