Prof. Kate Crawford: Mapping Empires: Artificial Intelligence, Power, and the History of Imperial Systems

Drawing on her research into the genealogies of technology and power over centuries, Crawford situates today's AI within a much older story. Following the imperial pathways of power since 1500, her talk explores how the systems today echo earlier histories of colonialism, militarization, and automation. Frontier models are no longer treated merely as products but as strategic assets and instruments of statecraft, subject to the logics of sovereignty and control. The geopolitics of AI are the latest instantiation of an older imperial grammar, where knowledge production is grounded in extraction, classification, and dominion.

Panel Discussion

Prof. Kate Crawford
Leading scholar of artificial intelligence and its material impacts and Professor at the University of Southern California, leads the Knowing Machines Project and is the author of Atlas der KI.

Prof. Lena Ulbricht
Associate Researcher in the research group “Technology, Power and Governance” at the Weizenbaum Institute and Professor of Political Science and Digitalisation at the University of Hildesheim.

Prof. Tobias Schäffter
President of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), Germany’s National Metrology Institute. He is also Professor of Biomedical Imaging at TU Berlin and the Einstein Center Digital Future.

Moderation: Tobi Müller, Cultural journalist and author

Registration

https://tickets.weizenbaum-institut.de/KateCrawford/

The event is free of charge and will be held in English.

About Prof. Kate Crawford

Kate Crawford is a leading scholar of AI. She is a Professor at the University of Southern California in LA, a Senior Principal Researcher at MSR New York, and the inaugural visiting chair of AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Her award-winning book, Atlas of AI, has been translated into fourteen languages and won multiple international prizes. It was also named a best book of the year by The Financial Times. She has advised policymakers in the White House, the European Parliament, and the United Nations.

Beyond her scholarly work, Crawford is an award-winning artist. She produces large-scale installations and artworks that are in the permanent collections of MoMA, Rijksmuseum Twenthe, and the Design Museum of London. Her most recent work, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Power and Technology Since 1500, won the Silver Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, the Grand Prize of the European Commission for art and technology, and the Boghossian Art Prize. TIME100 named Crawford as one of the world’s most influential people in AI.