Kate Crawford | Costs of Scale: Mapping the Challenges of AI

About this event

As AI systems grow in scale, their costs are growing with them, often hidden from view. In this talk, Kate Crawford maps three interlocking challenges of generative AI. First, control failures: as models become more complex and opaque, the ability to predict and audit their activity is lagging dangerously behind. Second, climate risks: the vast energy, water, and mineral demands of data centers are placing growing pressure on planetary systems. Third, cognitive offloading: as we delegate thinking to machines, we risk eroding the human capacities of reflection, memory, discernment and creativity. Together, these costs demand a rethinking of AI’s trajectory.

Kate Crawford is a leading scholar of artificial intelligence. She is a Professor at the University of Southern California, where she founded the Knowing Machines Research Group. She is also the inaugural chair of AI and Justice at the école Normale Supérieure in Paris, and a Distinguished Fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin. Her best-selling book Atlas of AI has won multiple international prizes, been translated into fourteen languages, and was named a best book of the year by The Financial Times . She has advised policymakers around the world, including the United Nations, the European Parliament, and she is on the AI Council of President Sanchez of Spain. She also makes large-scale research installations which have been exhibited at hundreds of museums around the world. Her latest visual work Calculating Empires won the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale 2025, the Grand Prize of the European Commission for art and technology, and the Boghossian Art Prize. It is currently exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, and is in their permanent collection. TIME 100 named Crawford as one of the world’s most influential people in AI.

Cosponsored by the University Core Curriculum, the Boston College Center for Psychological Humanities & Ethics, and the Gerson Family Lecture Fund.

All Lowell Humanities Series lectures are free and open to the public. Registration via Eventbrite is required for in-person attendance.

The Lowell Humanities Series is sponsored by the Lowell Institute, Boston College's Institute for the Liberal Arts, and the Provost's Office.