ARTIFICIAL intelligence is everywhere these days, from the Alexa virtual assistant in your kitchen to the algorithms that decide on your suitability for a job or a mortgage. But what exactly is it? The definition matters because to a great extent it dictates how we think about AI's impact. If AI is something that outperforms humans by definition, it seems logical to trust it to identify people who should be stopped and searched via facial recognition, say, or to make judgements on which offenders should get probation. If it is solely about algorithms, it becomes a lot easier to sweep aside issues of bias and injustice as mere technical issues. Kate Crawford takes a broader view. Co-founder of the AI Now Institute at New York University and now a researcher at Microsoft Research and the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, she has spent the best part of two decades investigating the political and social implications of AI. In her new book, Atlas of AI, she also looks at the global infrastructure that underpins the rise of this technology.
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