Anatomy of an AI System: The Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources

Anatomy of an AI System is a huge map and an accompanying essay by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler that seeks to explain the systems behind voice-based technologies, the interactions we have with these systems, and the effects they might have on the world today. The map traces the systems used to run an Amazon Echo, a cylindrical AI-powered gadget that reacts to human voices and carries out their demands. The main artwork is accompanied by an essay in twenty-one parts, with which Crawford and Joler lay bare the histories, technologies, economies and inequalities behind voice-enabled systems and the companies that produce them. The artists conclude: “We offer up this map and essay as a way to begin seeing across a wider range of system extractions. The scale required to build artificial intelligence systems is too complex, too obscured by intellectual property law, and too mired in logistical complexity to fully comprehend in the moment. Yet you draw on it every time you issue a simple voice command to a small cylinder in your living room: ‘Alexa, what time is it?’ And so the cycle continues.”