Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence

Kate Crawford's 2021 book examines AI as a material system rather than a software abstraction — tracing the physical infrastructure of AI from lithium mines in Nevada to Amazon fulfilment centres to facial recognition deployments in schools. The argument is that AI is not an intangible technology but one built on extraction: of minerals, of labour, of data, of attention. For AI governance practitioners, this book provides the structural framing that most compliance frameworks omit: who bears the costs of AI development and who captures the benefits are governance questions as much as technical ones.

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