Neither artificial nor intelligent: the cost of AI

We talk about AI like it's a cloud. Something floating, clean, made of nothing but math. Tap a screen, get an answer, move on. But there's a whole world holding that answer up, and most of us never get to see it.

Kate Crawford has spent years mapping that hidden world. She's a researcher who studies the real-life footprint of artificial intelligence, and her book Atlas of AI opens with a line that has stayed with me: "AI is neither artificial nor intelligent." She goes on: it is "embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labor, infrastructures, logistics, histories, and classifications."

Read that again. Natural resources. Human labor. The thing we treat as weightless is built from the most physical parts of the planet. Crawford traces it: the lithium and rare earth minerals pulled from the ground for our devices, the enormous energy data centers drink, and the people, often underpaid and far from view, who label and clean the data so a model can sound smart. None of it is magic. All of it has a cost, and that cost lands on real bodies and real places.

Why this is yours to notice

Here's the part I want you to sit with. The labor at the bottom of these supply chains, the mining, the content moderation, the data work, is disproportionately carried by women and by people in the Global South. The decisions about what gets built, and who pays for it, are mostly made somewhere else, by someone else. When a system is designed without you in the room, you tend to become the cost rather than the customer.

So when a tool promises to make your life frictionless, it's worth a gentle, honest question: frictionless for whom? Whose effort got hidden so mine could feel easy?

This isn't about guilt. You didn't build the machine. It's about staying awake. The companies counting on you to see AI as pure and effortless are often the same ones who'd rather you not ask where it comes from. Asking is a small act of self-respect. You deserve to understand the things you lean on.

One thing to try today: next time you use an AI tool, pause for one breath and name one real thing behind it. The energy. The minerals. The person who labeled the data. Just notice. Clarity is a quiet kind of power, and it's yours.

Quote to sit with

"AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. Rather, artificial intelligence is both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labor, infrastructures, logistics, histories, and classifications." — Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI

💌 Sarah