Kate Crawford

Kate Crawford is a researcher and author whose work focuses on the social and political dimensions of AI at scale. She co-founded the AI Now Institute at New York University in 2017, which has produced some of the most consequential empirical research on algorithmic accountability in public services, labour, and surveillance.

Her 2021 book "Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence" examines AI not as software but as a material system — tracing the lithium mines, data centres, warehouses, and low-wage annotation labour that make AI possible. The book argues that AI is not a technology that floats above the material world but one that depends on it, reshapes it, and extracts from it. This framing — AI as extraction — has influenced how environmental costs are discussed in AI governance debates.

Crawford's earlier work on "data hunger" identified patterns of AI development that treat consent and context as obstacles to training data collection. Her 2016 paper "Artificial Intelligence's White Guy Problem" raised questions about AI bias when the mainstream AI field was not ready to take them seriously.

AUSSI regards Crawford as one of the essential thinkers for understanding AI governance as a political and economic question, not only a technical one.