You Don’t Have to Embrace AI or Boycott It. Ethical Advocates Say There’s a Third Option

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Rejecting every tool is not the only alternative to unquestioning adoption. Experts explain how informed choices can push the market toward better systems.

You Don't Have to Embrace AI or Boycott It. Ethical Advocates Say There's a Third Option

“I wanted to call the book ‘The Apocalypse Fetish,’ but my publisher wouldn’t let me,” Eleanor Drage recently told The Standard. The senior research fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence instead called her new book What If We Got AI Right: How to stop catastrophising and build an ethical future, and in it she sets out to dismantle the dystopian doomsday rhetoric that has taken hold.

“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,” Drage says.

In 2023 almost 28,000 people—including Steve Wozniak, Elon

In 2023 almost 28,000 people—including Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk, and the CEOs of several AI companies—signed on to an open letter written by the Future of Life Institute asking for a six-month pause or even a government moratorium on AI development past GPT-4. Bill Gates just wrote an essay last week warning that Big Tech is downplaying the dangers of AI, which he said includes bioterrorism and mass unemployment.

Within such a narrow view of AI, Drage argues, there’s no space for the possibility that we could also live harmoniously alongside it. “It’s just to do with how exciting it is to sit in a room and think about the possibility of a global apocalypse.” The biggest risks of AI, she argues, are really the systems, incentives and power structures currently shaping it. She argues that it’s the people behind these who are paradoxically pushing the apocalyptic narrative.

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There are however real concerns, and arguably real dangers inherent to AI development, especially as energy costs rise and fears of mass unemployment mount. The U.S. government even imposed a temporary export ban on Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 frontier models earlier this year.

Yet AI isn’t slowing down

Yet AI isn’t slowing down. The United States leads in global private AI investment, committing $289 billion in 2025, 23 times more than China. Meanwhile the International Data Center Authority’s 2025 Global Artificial Intelligence Report found that 76 percent of organizations now use AI. And the UN says more than 1 billion people use conversational AI weekly.

Given the serious consequences it could impose on society and the planet, is there even an ethical way to engage with AI? Or should we just boycott it altogether?

Source: www.inc.com