Kate Crawford
Professor, researcher, maker of things
~Book: Atlas of AI
~Installation: Calculating Empires
~NYT video: AI's Real Environmental Impact nytimes.com/2025/09/26/opinion/…
- 📢 It's the last week for PhD students to apply for an internship with FATE (Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics) in NYC! 🎉 We welcome a wide range of disciplines (CS, STS, law, anthro, media studies, philosophy) apply.careers.microsoft.com/careers/job?...
- Reposted by Kate CrawfordIn her Long Now Talk, @katecrawford.bsky.social argues that AI has created a metabolic rift: massive data collection that acts like poor nutrition at planetary scale. However, this is something we’ve seen before, dating back to the 1500s. Watch the full talk here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsBn...
- Reposted by Kate CrawfordJoin us on Wednesday, October 8, for SciCafe: Mapping the Costs of AI. Kate Crawford (@katecrawford.bsky.social), research professor at the University of Southern California, will explore the environmental and human cost of AI systems. SciCafe is 21+ and free with RSVP. Get tickets: bit.ly/4nB7w33
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- New essay now online: "EATING THE FUTURE: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop." AI consumes planetary resources and excretes slop, polluting environmental & information ecologies. It's a new metabolic rift - disrupting the cycles that sustain both humans and AI alike. www.e-flux.com/architecture...
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- Reposted by Kate CrawfordRegister to join this timely discussion on June 2, in person or on line, with @katecrawford.bsky.social @hofrench.bsky.social @tamigraph.bsky.social and @triofrancos.bsky.social, hosted by my Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study www.ias.edu/events/raree...
- The EPA is being rolled back to the 1980s. Think big hair, WHAM, and Exxon hiding the fact that burning fossil fuels was driving climate change.
- We've gone from climate change denial to climate change criminalization. First they defund the science, now the FBI is prosecuting groups like Habitat for Humanity for fraud. newrepublic.com/post/192660/...
- Meta *removed* @gilduran.com's article because it was about "topics like the ‘Network State’ concept and critiques of tech industry figures..." 👀
- And now for the latest in fresh hell...
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- Generated AI plants are thriving online, with fake "seeds" selling on Amazon - people gravitating to impossible flora while real plants vanish. We're enchanted with simulacra as actual biodiversity disappears. @giovannialoi.bsky.social cswr.hds.harvard.edu/news/2025/02...
- Rare earths are central to the US administration's capture strategy: from Ukraine to Greenland. When people exclude the mineral dependencies of AI (as with most everything else) they're missing the story www.ft.com/content/65ee...
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- Reposted by Kate CrawfordJD Vance is proclaiming to the world that the US's AI industry will dominate, Elon Musk and DOGE are hollowing out the government with an AI-first strategy, and Silicon Valley's is stuck on a growth-at-all-costs AI approach. As @katecrawford.bsky.social put it: 'AI is in its empire era'
- The International Energy Agency just increased its prior growth predictions for energy demand. Data centers are one of the major drivers. Here's why that's significant: www.theverge.com/news/614356/...
- The AI Summit ends in rupture. AI accelerationists want pure expansion—more capital, energy, private infrastructure, no guard rails. Public interest camp supports labor, sustainability, shared data. safety, and oversight. The gap never looked wider. AI is in its empire era.
- Whoa! Calculating Empires made the front cover of Saturday's El PAIS newspaper. Far-ranging interview on the interconnections of politics, theory, and technology in our work and personal lives: from the Serbian protests to the AI Summit. @elpais.com @minipetite.bsky.social elpais.com/babelia/2025...
- This week the first provisions of the AI Act take effect. Prohibited AI systems include: emotion recognition in schools & work (a victory there), social rating systems, predictive policing for individuals & real-time facial recognition in public spaces. www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/ar...
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- DeepSeek forces a rethink of the compute & energy costs of AI models. In a new paper with @sashamtl.bsky.social @strubell.bsky.social, we look at the full environmental impacts of AI – both direct and indirect – and what 𝐉e𝐯𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐨𝐱 means for AI and climate. A thread 🧵
- Hallucination administration
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- My prediction in @wired.com: 2025 is the year of AI agents. The coming psychopolitical regime "directs the environments where our ideas are born, developed, and expressed. Its power lies in its intimacy—it infiltrates our subjectivity. We will be playing an imitation game that ultimately plays us."
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- Reposted by Kate Crawford"92 million low-income people in the U.S. states—everyone whose income is less than 200 percent of the federal poverty line—have some basic aspect of their lives decided by AI" www.techtonicjustice.org/reports/ines... this is a damning report
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- Reposted by Kate CrawfordWhen I was 5, I loved science, which I took to be planets and magnets and chemicals and shit. Soon I realized science was a collective human activity, and these were just the objects of its attention. Anyway, whenever I read an OpEd on how science isn't political, I think "Are you 5 years old?"
