Heyn, «Berlin’s Wonderful Horse.»
Pfungst, Clever Hans.
«Clever Hans’ Again.»
Pfungst, Clever Hans.
Pfungst.
Lapuschkin et al., «Unmasking Clever Hans Predictors.»
See the work of philosopher Val Plumwood on the dualisms of intelligence-stupid, emotional-rational, and master-slave. Plumwood, «Politics of Reason.»
Turing, «Computing Machinery and Intelligence.»
Von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain, 44. This approach was deeply critiqued by Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do.
See Weizenbaum, «On the Impact of the Computer on Society,» After his death, Minsky was implicated in serious allegations related to convicted pedophile and rapist Jeffrey Epstein. Minsky was one of several scientists who met with Epstein and visited his island retreat where underage girls were forced to have sex with members of Epstein’s coterie. As scholar Meredith Broussard observes, this was part of a broader culture of exclusion that became endemic in AI: «As wonderfully creative as Minsky and his cohort were, they also solidified the culture of tech as a billionaire boys’ club. Math, physics, and the other ‘hard’ sciences have never been hospitable to women and people of color; tech followed this lead.» See Broussard, Artificial Unintelligence, 174.
Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 202–3.
Greenberger, Management and the Computer of the Future, 315.
Dreyfus, Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence.
Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do.
Ullman, Life in Code, 136–37.
See, as one of many examples, Poggio et al., «Why and When Can Deep – but Not Shallow – Networks Avoid the Curse of Dimensionality.»
Quoted in Gill, Artificial Intelligence for Society, 3.
Russell and Norvig, Artificial Intelligence, 30.
Daston, «Cloud Physiognomy.»
Didi-Huberman, Atlas, 5.
Didi-Huberman, 11.
Franklin and Swenarchuk, Ursula Franklin Reader, Prelude.
For an account of the practices of data colonization, see «Colonized by Data»; and Mbembé, Critique of Black Reason.
Fei-Fei Li quoted in Gershgorn, «Data That Transformed AI Research.»
Russell and Norvig, Artificial Intelligence, 1.
Bledsoe quoted in McCorduck, Machines Who Think, 136.
Mattern, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt, xxxiv-xxxv.
Ananny and Crawford, «Seeing without Knowing.»
Any list will always be an inadequate account of all the people and communities who have inspired and informed this work. I’m particularly grateful to these research communities: FATE (Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics) and the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research, the AI Now Institute at NYU, the Foundations of AI working group at the École Normale Supérieure, and the Richard von Weizsäcker Visiting Fellows at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.
Saville, «Towards Humble Geographies.»
For more on crowdworkers, see Gray and Suri, Ghost Work; and Roberts, Behind the Screen.
Canales, Tenth of a Second.
Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
Cetina, Epistemic Cultures, 3.
«Emotion Detection and Recognition (EDR) Market Size.»
Nelson, Tu, and Hines, «Introduction,» 5.
Danowski and de Castro, Ends of the World.
Franklin, Real World of Technology, 5.
Brechin, Imperial San Francisco.
Brechin, 29.
Agricola quoted in Brechin, 25.
Quoted in Brechin, 50.
Brechin, 69.
See, e. g., Davies and Young, Tales from the Dark Side of the City; and «Grey Goldmine.»
For more on the street-level changes in San Francisco, see Bloomfield, «History of the California Historical Society’s New Mission Street Neighborhood.»
«Street Homelessness.» See also «Counterpoints: An Atlas of Displacement and Resistance.»
Gee, «San Francisco or Mumbai?»
H. W. Turner published a detailed geological survey of the Silver Peak area in July 1909. In beautiful prose, Turner extolled the geological variety within what he described as «slopes of cream and pink tuffs, and little hillocks of a bright brick red.» Turner, «Contribution to the Geology of the Silver Peak Quadrangle, Nevada,» 228.
Lambert, «Breakdown of Raw Materials in Tesla’s Batteries and Possible Breaknecks.»
Bullis, «Lithium-Ion Battery.»
«Chinese Lithium Giant Agrees to Three-Year Pact to Supply Tesla.»
Wald, «Tesla Is a Battery Business.»
Scheyder, «Tesla Expects Global Shortage.»
Wade, «Tesla’s Electric Cars Aren’t as Green.»
Business Council for Sustainable Energy, «2019 Sustainable Energy in America Factbook.» U. S. Energy Information Administration, «What Is U. S. Electricity Generation by Energy Source?»
Whittaker et al., AI Now Report 2018.
Parikka, Geology of Media, vii – viii; McLuhan, Understanding Media.
Ely, «Life Expectancy of Electronics.»
Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson use the term «extractivism» to name the relation between different forms of extractive operations in contemporary capitalism, which we see repeated in the context of the AI industry. Mezzadra and Neilson, «Multiple Frontiers of Extraction.»
Nassar et al., «Evaluating the Mineral Commodity Supply Risk of the US Manufacturing Sector.»
Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 74.
See, e. g., Ayogu and Lewis, «Conflict Minerals.»
Burke, «Congo Violence Fuels Fears of Return to 90s Bloodbath.»
«Congo ’s Bloody Coltan.»
«Congo ’s Bloody Coltan.»
«Transforming Intel’s Supply Chain with Real-Time Analytics.»
See, e. g., an open letter from seventy signatories that criticizes the limitations of the so-called conflict-free certification process: «An Open Letter.»
«Responsible Minerals Policy and Due Diligence.»
In The Elements of Power, David S. Abraham describes the invisible networks of rare metals traders in global electronics supply chains: «The network to get rare metals from the mine to your laptop travels through a murky network of traders, processors, and component manufacturers. Traders are the middlemen who do more than buy and sell rare metals: they help to regulate information and are the hidden link that helps in navigating the network between metals plants and the components in our laptops» [89].
«Responsible Minerals Sourcing.»
Liu, «Chinese Mining Dump.»
«Bayan Obo Deposit.»
Maughan, «Dystopian Lake Filled by the World’s Tech Lust.»
Hird, «Waste, Landfills, and an Environmental Ethics of Vulnerability,» 105.
Abraham, Elements of Power, 175.
Abraham, 176.
Simpson, «Deadly Tin Inside Your Smartphone.»
Hodal, «Death Metal.»
Hodal.
Tully, «Victorian Ecological Disaster.»
Starosielski, Undersea Network, 34.
See Couldry and Mejías, Costs of Connection, 46.
Couldry and Mejías, 574.
For a superb account of the history of undersea cables, see Starosielski, Undersea Network.
Dryer, «Designing Certainty,» 45.
Dryer, 46.
Dryer, 266-68.
More people are now drawing attention to this problem – including researchers at AI Now. See Dobbe and Whittaker, «AI and Climate Change.»
See, as an example of early scholarship in this area, Ensmenger, «Computation, Materiality, and the Global Environment.»
Hu, Prehistory of the Cloud, 146.
Jones, «How to Stop Data Centres from Gobbling Up the World’s Electricity.» Some progress has been made toward mitigating these concerns through greater energy efficiency practices, but significant long-term challenges remain. Masanet et al., «Recalibrating Global Data Center Energy – Use Estimates.»
Belkhir and Elmeligi, «Assessing ICT Global Emissions Footprint»; Andrae and Edler, «On Global Electricity Usage.»
Strubell, Ganesh, and McCallum, «Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP.»
Strubell, Ganesh, and McCallum.
Sutton, «Bitter Lesson.»
«AI and Compute.»
Cook et al., Clicking Clean.
Ghaffary, «More Than 1,000 Google Employees Signed a Letter.» See also «Apple Commits to Be 100 Percent Carbon Neutral»; Harrabin, «Google Says Its Carbon Footprint Is Now Zero»; Smith, «Microsoft Will Be Carbon Negative by 2030.»
«Powering the Cloud.»
«Powering the Cloud.»
«Powering the Cloud.»
Hogan, «Data Flows and Water Woes.»
«Off Now.»
Carlisle, «Shutting Off NSA’s Water Gains Support.»
Materiality is a complex concept, and there is a lengthy literature that contends with it in such fields as STS, anthropology, and media studies. In one sense, materiality refers to what Leah Lievrouw describes as «the physical character and existence of objects and artifacts that makes them useful and usable for certain purposes under particular conditions.» Lievrouw quoted in Gillespie, Boczkowski, and Foot, Media Technologies, 25. But as Diana Coole and Samantha Frost write, «Materiality is always something more than ‘mere’ matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unproductive.» Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, 9.
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Review of Maritime Transport, 2017.
George, Ninety Percent of Everything, 4.
Schlanger, «If Shipping Were a Country.»
Vidal, «Health Risks of Shipping Pollution.»
«Containers Lost at Sea–2017 Update.»
Adams, «Lost at Sea.»
Mumford, Myth of the Machine.
Labban, «Deterritorializing Extraction.» For an expansion on this idea, see Arboleda, Planetary Mine.
Ananny and Crawford, «Seeing without Knowing.»
Wilson, «Amazon and Target Race.»
Lingel and Crawford, «Alexa, Tell Me about Your Mother.»
Federici, Wages against Housework; Gregg, Counterproductive.
In The Utopia of Rules, David Graeber details the sense of loss experienced by white-collar workers who now have to enter data into the decision-making systems that have replaced specialist administrative support staff in most professional workplaces.
Smith, Wealth of Nations, 4–5.
Marx and Engels, Marx-Engels Reader, 479. Marx expanded on this notion of the worker as an «appendage» in Capital, vol. 1: «In handicrafts and manufacture, the worker makes use of a tool; in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labor proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow. In manufacture the workers are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into it as its living appendages.» Marx, Das Kapital, 548–49.
Luxemburg, «Practical Economies,» 444.
Thompson, «Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.»
Thompson, 88–90.
Werrett, «Potemkin and the Panopticon,» 6.
See, e. g., Cooper, «Portsmouth System of Manufacture.»
Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Horne and Maly, Inspection House.
Mirzoeff, Right to Look, 58.
Mirzoeff, 55.
Mirzoeff, 56.
Gray and Suri, Ghost Work.
Irani, «Hidden Faces of Automation.»
Yuan, «How Cheap Labor Drives China’s A. I. Ambitions»; Gray and Suri, «Humans Working behind the AI Curtain.»
Berg et al., Digital Labour Platforms.
Roberts, Behind the Screen; Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet, 111–40.
Silberman et al., «Responsible Research with Crowds.»
Silberman et al.
Huet, «Humans Hiding behind the Chatbots.»
Huet.
See Sadowski, «Potemkin AI.»
Taylor, «Automation Charade.»
Taylor.
Gray and Suri, Ghost Work.
Standage, Turk, 23.
Standage, 23.
See, e. g., Aytes, «Return of the Crowds,» 80.
Irani, «Difference and Dependence among Digital Workers,» 225.
Pontin, «Artificial Intelligence.»
Menabrea and Lovelace, «Sketch of the Analytical Engine.»
Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 39–43.
Babbage evidently acquired an interest in quality-control processes while trying (vainly) to establish a reliable supply chain for the components of his calculating engines.
Schaffer, «Babbage’s Calculating Engines and the Factory System,» 280.
Taylor, People’s Platform, 42.
Katz and Krueger, «Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements.»
Rehmann, «Taylorism and Fordism in the Stockyards,» 26.
Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 56, 67; Specht, Red Meat Republic.
Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management.
Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, 22.
Qiu, Gregg, and Crawford, «Circuits of Labour»; Qiu, Goodbye iSlave.
Markoff, «Skilled Work, without the Worker.»
Guendelsberger, On the Clock, 22.
Greenhouse, «McDonald’s Workers File Wage Suits.»
Greenhouse.
Mayhew and Quinlan, «Fordism in the Fast Food Industry.»
Ajunwa, Crawford, and Schultz, «Limitless Worker Surveillance.»
Mikel, «WeWork Just Made a Disturbing Acquisition.»
Mahdawi, «Domino’s ‘Pizza Checker’ Is Just the Beginning.»
Wajcman, «How Silicon Valley Sets Time.»
Wajcman, 1277.
Gora, Herzog, and Tripathi, «Clock Synchronization.»
Eglash, «Broken Metaphor,» 361.
Kemeny and Kurtz, «Dartmouth Timesharing,» 223.
Eglash, «Broken Metaphor,» 364.
Brewer, «Spanner, TrueTime.»
Corbett et al., «Spanner,» 14, cited in House, «Synchronizing Uncertainty,» 124.
Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps, 104.
Galison, 112.
Colligan and Linley, «Media, Technology, and Literature,» 246.