Should We Stop Catastrophising About AI? With Eleanor Drage and Carl Miller

**Mia Sorrenti** (0:00)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Where Great Minds Meet. I'm senior producer Mia Sorrenti. We are deeply confused about artificial intelligence, what it is, who it serves, and whether it leads us towards utopia or catastrophe. But according to AI ethicist Eleanor Drage, these dramatic narratives often distract us from the urgent problems already embedded in the technology. On today's episode, Drage joins researcher and author Carl Miller to explore the culture and ideas driving the AI arms race.
From billionaires seeking to overcome death to biased policing algorithms and the growing influence of big tech over government, they examine the forces shaping artificial intelligence and ask who stands to benefit. Let's join Carl now as more.

**Carl Miller** (0:47)
Well welcome everyone to Intelligence Squared. I'm Carl Miller, and our guest today is Eleanor Drage. She's a senior research fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge, host of the Good Robot Podcast, author of several books, and now another one, the one we're talking about today, What If We Got AI Right? How to stop catastrophizing and build an ethical future.
Very warm welcome to you, Eleanor.

**Eleanor Drage** (1:10)
Thanks so much for having me.

**Carl Miller** (1:12)
All right. So it's 2030, Eleanor. Everyone in the entire world has read your book.
Everyone has bought into the vision and we have got AI right. What does that actually look like for someone listening to this? What interactions do they have with AI? How are they governed? How are they protected? How are they liberated?

**Eleanor Drage** (1:34)
Do you know what? We could even say 2027

**Carl Miller** (1:39)
Why not? Let's be ambitious.

**Eleanor Drage** (1:40)
Infinitely doable. So on a bigger scale, we need to be decentralizing compute power.
We need to be making open license technologies that encourage the redistribution of wealth. And I work with incredible people who are making microscopes out of 3D printed bits and off-the-shelf computer parts that anyone can make anywhere in the world and make money from. We need to be tackling big tech monopolies and incendiary foreign policy. You know, good luck to us. But also, we need to be doing things that you and I can do day to day. We need to be going into work and saying to our boss, what is this thing that you're making me use?
Is it really proven to improve my productivity or will it just give me more work? Can you show me the data behind this? Can you explain to me how it works?
We need to be preventing the police from using weird AI tools to track and monitor protests that are proven to discriminate against people of color and left-wing protests. We need to be asking whether consent mechanisms that we have to use to hand over our data really are consent mechanisms or are just a total con. So these are things that we can be doing short term. We can also be doing things like changing the ideologies around AI and changing the images we use to depict it so that it's not just terminators dropping off bridges in San Francisco and the Vitruvian man that's hanging in front of the desk at Google DeepMind that symbolizes human perfectionism, this future where we will become perfect because of AI, and instead use symbols of AI that are realistic and feasible, like silicon cubes. Does anyone know what that looks like? They look like, or quartz mines. Has anyone seen one of those? People don't know what AI is or looks like. Data labellers show them, show their faces. And I think that we can incrementally come to a place where we get a better understanding of what AI is and what actually we want from it.

**Carl Miller** (3:54)
What does a silicon cube look like? I mean, is it a white cube?

**Eleanor Drage** (4:00)
Well, silicon monocrystals are, they're really beautiful. And I think when I saw a picture by Catherine Ruslan, she's a photographer, and did a real close up of one of these cubes. It was glistening and silvery and shiny and tactile.
And I thought, well, what a great image. And why don't we have that in the FT or the Times or whatever people read that gives you a really good sense of, oh, AI is actually a material thing, and it's not just a brain floating and a vat and other science fiction fantasies. And from there, we can ask questions about the environment and labour that we're unable to ask other ways.

**Carl Miller** (4:41)
Okay, so it's 2027 There's more glistening cubes. There's less Vitruvian men. We've got rid of incendiary foreign policy, which I think is particularly laudatory for us if it's done in one year.