Mapping Planetary AI: Professor Kate Crawford explores the tech empires reshaping our world
Media release
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Monday 11 November 2024
From Google searches and chat bots to image generators, translators and security systems, generative artificial intelligence is now part of everyday life. Marketed as cloud-based algorithms and seamless assistants which can answer questions, problem-solve and perform tasks, generative AI is now at the heart of a major shift in how we create, access and even define knowledge. But what do we really know about this pervasive technology? Do our societies have robust guardrails in place to protect people and democracies, and have we reckoned with AI’s environmental impact?
Leading international scholar of artificial intelligence, Professor Kate Crawford, will deliver State Library Victoria’s 2024 For Future Reference lecture, titled Mapping Planetary AI. Named on Time100’s list of the most influential people in AI, Professor Crawford warns that AI systems are reshaping the planet in lasting and often hidden ways, and that the mass extraction of data across the internet, as well as from libraries and archives, raises important questions about who gets to build private AI models on public data, and who is in control of these tools of information and power.
‘Artificial intelligence is neither artificial nor intelligent – it is profoundly material and is now one of the largest planetary architectures ever built by our species, requiring vast amounts of energy, water, data, and labour to function. This talk will explore the dual nature of generative AI as a cultural transformation and a material force, placing these systems in a historical lineage of empires that used new technologies to centralise power and reshape societies and ecosystems on a global scale,’ she said.
Kate Crawford is a Professor at USC Annenberg, a Senior Principal Researcher at MSR New York, and was the inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Her book The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (2021) won multiple awards and was named one of the best books of 2021 by New Scientist and The Financial Times. Her latest work, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, a collaboration with Vladan Joler, won the Grand Prize of the European Commission for art and technology.
State Library Victoria CEO, Paul Duldig said Professor Kate Crawford will help us understand the role we each need to play in the future of AI, and who gets to shape what happens next.
‘Libraries have long been an essential community resource for trusted information and knowledge sharing. With the advent of AI, our methods may need to change, but our mission remains the same.’
Funded by the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust, For Future Reference is an annual lecture series which shines a light on the influence of women via the medium of literature, storytelling and authorship, with a focus on the future archives to be held in the State Collection. The series is supported by the Library’s Women Writers Fund initiative, which seeks to redress the historical gender imbalance in our collection. The fund acquires works by under-represented 19th and 20th century women writers who have been overlooked and are at risk of being lost forever, and acts as inspiration for current writers, artists and thinkers.
For Future Reference 2024: Mapping Planetary AI with Professor Kate Crawford will be held at 7.30pm, Thursday 5 December in the Conversation Quarter, State Library Victoria.