Atlas of AI
Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence, published by Yale in 2021, is Crawford's systematic mapping of the physical substrate of artificial intelligence. The book traces AI operations from the lithium mines of Nevada's Clayton Valley to the cobalt extraction in the Democratic Republic of Congo, from the data centers of Nevada to the click-work of content moderation, from the training corpora scraped from the commons to the classification systems encoded in model architectures.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Crawford's thesis is that AI is not intelligent, not artificial, and not merely software. It is a "material, computational, and infrastructural regime" whose operations depend on specific forms of extraction, labor exploitation, and environmental damage that the industry's self-presentation systematically obscures. The book is organized as an atlas — a geographic mapping — precisely because AI's reality is geographic and material, not merely computational.
The book documents cobalt mines in