#2: Atlas of AI

Atlas of AI: Kate Crawford in conversation with Judy Wajcman

In a talk hosted by the Women in Data Science and AI project, part of The Alan Turing Institute’s Public Policy Programme, Kate Crawford discusses her excellent book, Atlas of AI (Yale University Press. 2021) with Judy Wajcman.

This conversation ranges over a wide number of issues, as explored in Kate Crawford’s book, relating to how ‘global networks underpinning AI technology are damaging the environment, entrenching inequality, and fueling a shift toward undemocratic governance’. The includes, for example, looking materially as how mining sites, factories, and vast data collections areneeded to make AI function.

At the very end of the talk, Judy Wajcman picks up on how feminist perspectives are very active in this area. She remarks how when she was first getting into the area of gender and technology not a lot of women were involved in the field. Now, she notes, it is striking how many excellent books and research that’s being done is being led by women and feminists. She asks Kate Crawford why that might be, who then replies:

It is certainly interesting that we are seeing a far more diverse coalition of people working on these issues … and I think that should tell us something in terms of who are the people who have experienced marginalisation, ostracisation, mis-recognition by systems; other people who are going to be very alert to these questions will be asking, again, how do we improve these kinds of issues before they come more ingrained in our societies
– Kate Crawford (in conversation with Judy Wajcman)

Also, highly pertinent to the interests of this project on strucutralism. Kate Crawford goes onto the remark on what was happening in very early years of artificial intelligence, in the 1950s and 60s:

…even back then, you would have Margaret Mead on the same panel as Gregory Bateson; you’d have people who are actually designing systems sitting there with anthropologists who are thinking about the social implications. We lost that for a while … and I think what we’ve seen is a kind of over prioritisation of the technical. And it is something we really need to correct for now, because these are no longer systems that are just being designed in labs or that are essentially theoretical interventions. These are systems that are effecting billions of people around the world and in very different ways. So, what that means is that we have to start re-conceptualising AI as an inter-discipline, and as one that has to be very much grounded in the communities who are being affected by these tools everyday. So, that is certainly something that is urgently needed for the next decade in this space.
Kate Crawford (in conversation with Judy Wajcman)

(NB. Reference to both Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson is made on Paul Pangaro’s webpage on Cybernetics, under the section heading ‘Origins of cybernetics’)