Blackwell’s Manchester are delighted to welcome Eleanor Drage and Cecilia Rikap to Blackwell’s to discuss their books, What If We Got AI Right and The Rulers: Corporate Power in the Age of AI and the Cloud.

Looking at the current landscape of AI and its possible futures, the authors will be in conversation with Jon Greenaway, author of Capitalism: A Horror Story.

Doors: 6.30pm, Start: 6.45pm

About What If We Got AI Right:

In a world obsessed with whether AI will destroy humanity, Eleanor Drage, one of the world’s leading AI ethicists, is asking a far more urgent – and actionable – question: what if we got AI right?

What If We Got AI Right? unpicks the dominant narratives around artificial intelligence and the culture and ideas that drive the AI arms race, offering a radically more hopeful, human-centred vision.

Drawing on cutting-edge research, real-world case studies and cultural analysis, Drage argues that the biggest risks of AI are not futuristic doomsday scenarios -but the systems, incentives and power structures shaping it today.

From Big Tech monopolies to hidden bias in algorithms, from ‘AI hype’ to the lack of public involvement in its design, this is a timely, provocative intervention that reframes AI as a social, political and ethical issue -not just a technical one. Only by bringing feminism, reparative justice and climate politics into the debate can we create a better future with machines.

‘It’s rare to find informed perspectives on AI that have both the imagination and the courage to counter the dominant narrative. This book makes space for possibility. Insightful, surprising and well-argued, it presents a refreshingly different take on AI and the futures it offers’ ― Sarah Housley, author of Designing Hope

About The Rulers:

Capitalism’s rulers are not abstract entities or shadowy operators. Amazon, Microsoft and Google are the cloud hegemons that subsume the world through the exercise of their intellectual monopolies. Giants like Disney, McDonalds, Nike or Walmart depend on them to use AI for knowledge and value extraction and for disciplining workers. States see some of their core functions sequestered. Innovation is not a free and neutral game, but a hierarchy topped by the rulers.

Rikap’s new theoretical framework is grounded in a unique trove of 112 interviews at the world’s largest firms and data on venture capital, acquisitions, open source, AI conferences and patents. They picture a map of the complexities and political implications of corporate power. In Rikap’s counterimage, technology is developed by the people and for the people and the planet through democratic planning.

About the authors:

Dr Eleanor Drage is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. One of the UK’s leading AI ethicists, her work has been covered by the BBC, the Guardian, Telegraph and Forbes, and she frequently speaks on radio and at AI conferences. She is host of The Good Robot Podcast, and a Top 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics 2022.

Cecilia Rikap is an Associate Professor in Economics and Head of Research at the University College London’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. She is also a tenure researcher of the CONICET, Argentina’s national research council, and associate researcher at COSTECH lab, Université de Technologie de Compiègne. She is the author of Capitalism, Power and Innovation: Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism Uncovered (Routledge), which recently won the EAEPE Joan Robinson Prize Competition, and The Digital Innovation Race: Conceptualizing the Emerging New World Order (Palgrave), the latter co-authored with B.A.K. Lundvall.