Dr Eleanor Drage, a senior research fellow at the University of Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, challenges the prevailing narrative of an AI apocalypse. In her new book, What If We Got AI Right: How to stop catastrophising and build an ethical future, she argues that the most significant risks of artificial intelligence are not the dystopian scenarios often portrayed, but rather the systems, incentives, and power structures currently shaping its development.
Rethinking AI Expertise
Drage is skeptical of the term 'AI ethicist' and the idea of a single expert. 'I don't believe that there can be an AI ethics expert,' she says. 'Part of what I'm trying to show in the book is that expertise in AI is always distributed. These systems have effects on the people who use them that the people who build them don't even understand. They've got environmental effects, and if we don't treat the environment as an expert, as a stakeholder, then we miss that too.'
The Silicon Valley Paradox
Drage points to a paradox in Silicon Valley, where figures like Elon Musk advocate for building AI while simultaneously warning of its potential dangers. 'There's a paradox that you see a lot with people like Elon Musk, who is like 'we have to build AI' but then signs open letters about how AI might also kill us and how we need to have a six-month pause on it,' she explains. 'It has nothing to do with living a good life alongside AI. It's just to do with how exciting it is to sit in a room and think about the possibility of a global apocalypse.'
Practical Steps for Ethical AI
To build a better AI future, Drage suggests decreasing the scale of AI systems and making them more tangible. She advocates for smaller, local data centres that can be understood and managed by communities. 'We really need to decide where we need something massive like OpenAI, and where we could use something smaller,' she says. 'We have a small data centre in our office that we manage and that isn't outsourced to Amazon Web Services. We understand what it does, where the data centre is, how much energy it uses. This turns AI into a real thing that we can touch and understand and make sense of.'
Drage emphasizes that this is not about condemning data centres but about using them more intelligently. 'It's about how there should be more small, local data centres that use the heat generated by them to power a sauna or sports complex. It's about being smart and reasonable about improving AI infrastructure to stop people from panicking. Normal citizens can make good decisions.'
Questioning AI Productivity
According to the UK government's latest sector study, the UK's AI ecosystem generates £23.9 billion in revenue. However, Drage urges workers and employers to critically assess whether AI truly improves productivity. 'At the moment, there isn't much evidence to suggest that AI is improving people's sustainable productivity,' she notes. 'It's making tasks more accessible — for example I wouldn't have been able to code something two years ago and now I've got a bunch of tools that mean I can take on new tasks. But then I have more stuff to do. What you're doing, effectively, is just increasing the workload. So there will be increased burnout. You cannot delete the human factor entirely.'
Drage recommends transparency in the workplace: 'Something that I think is especially important at work is just being really clear to yourself and your employer about how much a tool is helping you work less. We need a critical mass of people asking 'why are we using this?' and 'what does this actually do?''
