Anatomyof.ai Website Review

The Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources By Kate Crawford Kate Crawford is a Distinguished Research Professor at New York University, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New York, and the co-founder and co-director of the AI Now Institute at NYU.>1 and Vladan Joler Vladan Joler is a professor at the Academy of Arts at the University of Novi Sad and founder of SHARE Foundation. He is leading SHARE Lab, a research and data investigation lab for exploring different technical and social aspects of algorithmic transparency, digital labor exploitation, invisible infrastructures, A cylinder sits in a room. It is impas*ive, smooth, simple and small. It stands 14.8cm high, with a single blue-green circular light that traces around its upper rim. It is silently attending. A woman walks into the room, carrying a sleeping child in her arms, and she The cylinder springs into life. ‘OK.’ The room lights up. The woman makes a faint nodding gesture, and carries the child upstairs. This is an interaction with Amazon’s Echo device. Amazon advertising campaign, “All-New Amazon Echo”, September 27, 2017>3 A brief command and a response is the most common form of engagement with this consumer voice-enabled AI device. But in this fleeting moment of interaction, a vast matrix of capacities is invoked: interlaced chains of resource extraction, human labor and algorithmic processing across networks of mining, logistics, distribution, prediction and optimization. The scale of this system is almost beyond human imagining. How can we begin to see it, to grasp its immensity and complexity as a connected form? We start with an outline: an exploded view of a planetary system across three stages of birth, life and death, accompanied by an essay in 21 parts. Together, this becomes an The scene of the woman talking to Alexa is drawn from a 2017 promotional video advertising the latest version of the Amazon Echo. The video begins, “Say hello to the all-new Echo” and explains that the Echo will connect to Alexa (the artificial intelligence