Last year Kate Crawford, a New York University professor who runs an artificial intelligence research centre, set out to study the “black box” of processes that exist around the hugely popular Amazon Echo device.
Crawford did not do what you might expect when approaching AI — namely, study algorithms, computing systems and suchlike. Instead, she teamed up with Vladan Joler, a Serbian academic, to map the supply chains, raw materials, data and labour that underpin Alexa, the AI agent that Echo’s users talk to.
It was a daunting process — so much so that Joler and Crawford admit that their map, Anatomy of an AI System, is just a first step. The results are both chilling and challenging. For what the map shows is that contemporary western society is blind to the real price of its thirst for technology.