Just as linear perspective restructured how people recognized reality, generative AI is generating a new visual and political language.
During the talk, Crawford gave us a tour through her detailed artwork Calculating Empires. Through examples ranging from Liebig’s critique of agriculture “robbing” soil nutrients to Faraday’s latex-based electrical insulation that devastated rubber forests, Crawford showed how technologies have long created “metabolic rifts”: systems that extract more than they regenerate.
AI, she suggested, is the newest metabolic rift. Its ingestion cycle—massive-scale data collection prized for quantity over quality—acts like poor nutrition at planetary scale.
In the closing Q&A, Kevin Kelly asked what responsible, non-extractive AI might look like. Crawford imagined systems built on regenerative energy, consent-based data, and the ability to analyze their own biases and disparities. These futures aren’t impossible, just contested. Our task, Crawford urged, is to create new maps for an AI-shaped era and chart paths that protect the public interest and autonomy.
This talk was presented November 12, 02025 at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco.
Episode notes: https://ift.tt/Pj4EVGM
This talk is part of Long Now Talks.
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