“Hey, Siri, what are you doing with the planet?”

This work should take two years to track down patents and understand how and where data is stored, how much energy it uses, and more.

“I spent time in mines, went into Amazon fulfillment factories, visited all the places where AI is being built, looked at semiconductor manufacturing, and touched on all of these components in the supply chain,” Crawford says.

Crawford and Joler’s intensive, painstaking work aims to spark an informed conversation about artificial intelligence, which is expanding at such a rapid pace that it can seem like a fait accompli.

“(There needs to be) a democratic discussion so that people have some freedom of choice in the big decisions that take place both at the infrastructural level, such as the considerations of the data centers and the amount of energy and water that are used, all the way up to the cognitive level, such as our education, which…”