Sonja Drimmer: "If I could recommend only one book to someone interested in learning about the impact of incorporating artificial intelligence into the infrastructure of modern life (as is happening at breakneck speed), this would be it. The narrative of the book follows the life cycle of the hardware and software necessary to machine learning, from mining the minerals required to build the computers on which AI runs to creating, processing, and then making decisions with the data humans supply it (both with and without our permission).
The book’s thesis is crystal clear: It’s extraction all the way down. But what Kate Crawford reveals is about far more than environmental devastation and human exploitation. Having partnered with artist Trevor Paglen to create the landmark installation ImageNet Roulette (2019), and steeped in scholarship on visual culture, Crawford is well attuned to art’s entanglements with emerging algorithmic regimes and in particular how, when AI models are trained on images that must be translated into code to be machine-readable, these training sets become “classification engines” that establish new, deceptive “truths.”