Long Now Kate Crawford: Mapping Empires
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Dec 11, 2025 In this engaging discussion, Kate Crawford, a leading AI scholar and artist, delves into the historical connections between technology and imperial power. She explores how AI shifts representational authority from humans to machines and reveals the ecological consequences of our tech-driven economies. A fascinating highlight is her 'Calculating Empires' project, which maps 500 years of exploitation. Crawford also addresses the urgent need for responsible AI practices that inspire democratic and regenerative approaches to technology.
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Machines Replace The Human Eye
- Artificial perspective shifted the center of representation from God to the individual human eye, creating a lasting regime of truth.
- Kate Crawford argues neural networks now move that locus of representational power to the machine, reshaping what counts as reality.
Metabolic Rifts Are Recurrent
- 19th-century scientists discovered agriculture was extracting nutrients faster than soils could regenerate, naming it robbery agriculture.
- Marx called the resulting systemic disruption a "metabolic rift," a pattern that recurs with industrial technologies, including AI.
Victorian Telegraphs Devastated Forests
- Michael Faraday's discovery of gutta percha for insulating undersea telegraph cables drove mass extraction in Malaysian forests.
- Local workers felled trees for minimal pay and the Palakwim Guta vanished by the 1880s, an ecological disaster of a technological boom.
