Atlas of Anomalous AI

An atlas-format anthology that approaches artificial intelligence through art, philosophy and fiction instead of engineering.

The book takes its method from Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, an image map of the afterlife of antiquity, and assembles texts, artworks and historical material into a loose constellation. It has three sections, Models, Prediction and Mind, which follow three historical approaches to AI: Symbolic AI, Connectionism and Deep Learning. Contributors include Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Benjamin H. Bratton, Yuk Hui, Nora N. Khan, Hito Steyerl, Jorge Luis Borges, Ian Cheng, Hilma af Klint, Pierre Huyghe and the language models GPT-2 and GPT-3. Some images appear without captions, with explanations gathered at the back of the book. Bill Sherman wrote the foreword. Ignota Books published it in 2020.

Ben Vickers is chief technology officer at the Serpentine Galleries in London and co-founder of Ignota Books. K Allado-McDowell founded the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI.