Loved Empire of AI for exposing the power, labor, and resources behind artificial intelligence? Atlas of AI by maps the whole extractive system beneath the industry.
Curated by NextBookAfter Editors. This read-alike match weighs tone, themes, pacing, character dynamics, and emotional payoff rather than genre alone. See how recommendations are chosen.
Buy on AmazonWhy It's Your Next Read
- AI traced from mines and data centers to datasets and surveillance
- Hidden labor placed back inside the story of automation
- Corporate and state power examined alongside technical systems
- A planetary view of energy, inequality, classification, and control
If Empire of AI changed how you see OpenAI by following the money, compute, labor, and natural resources behind its ambitions, Atlas of AI pulls the camera farther back. Kate Crawford begins in the earth—with minerals, energy, and supply chains—then follows artificial intelligence through warehouses, data-labeling work, training sets, surveillance systems, and the institutions that decide whose categories count.
Where Karen Hao builds an investigative narrative around one extraordinarily powerful company, Crawford supplies the wider political anatomy. Her central argument is bracingly concrete: AI is neither artificial nor autonomous, but an extractive industry made from human work, physical infrastructure, taken data, and choices about power. Read together, the books turn technological inevitability back into something society can question.
After the empire's origin story, open the atlas that shows what it is built on.
What to read after Empire of AI
Readers searching for adult books like or similar to Empire of AI by Karen Hao usually want adult technology and society with qualities like tech power, hidden labor, resource extraction, and data politics.
If your search is specifically for books similar to Empire of AI for adults, this match keeps the grown-up stakes, voice, and reader payoff central rather than drifting into younger or purely genre-adjacent suggestions.
If you like Empire of AI and want to know what to read next, start with Atlas of AI. It is the closest NextBookAfter match for readers who want a book like Empire of AI with the same core appeal.
Atlas of AI is a similar next read for fans of Empire of AI by Karen Hao because it shares tech power, hidden labor, resource extraction, and data politics while moving through artificial intelligence and political economy.
What Readers Are Saying
"Accessible, informative, synthetic and encompassing." — Burc
What Readers Are Saying
"Mandatory reading for all “tech dudebros” who think AI is the ultimate answer to life and the universe." — hima
What Readers Are Saying
"One of the most sobering--verging on depressing--necessary books I've read in a while." — Craig Werner
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