Kate Crawford | Mapping Empires - YouTube
Kate Crawford explores the intersection of artificial intelligence, planetary resources, and historical power structures. By examining the evolution from Renaissance perspective to modern data centers, this talk traces how technological booms drive extraction and reshape ecological cycles. Kate Crawford explores the intersection of artificial intelligence, planetary resources, and historical power structures. By examining the evolution from Renaissance perspective to modern data centers, this talk traces how technological booms drive extraction and reshape ecological cycles.
Just as linear perspective restructured how people recognized reality, generative AI is generating a new visual and political language. During the talk, Crawford gave us a tour through her detailed artwork Calculating Empires. Through examples ranging from Liebig’s critique of agriculture “robbing” soil nutrients to Faraday’s latex-based electrical insulation that devastated rubber forests, Crawford showed how technologies have long created “metabolic rifts”: systems that extract more than they regenerate. AI, she suggested, is the newest metabolic rift. Its ingestion cycle—massive-scale…
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