Ahead of next year’s Housing Innovation Show, headline speaker Dr Eleanor Drage tells Housing Digital editor, Mark Cantrell why the sector must not take AI solutions at face value
The future is far from set in stone – or rather silicon – as many of the “high priests” of technology would prefer us to believe, so there’s no harm in asking if AI is the right tool for any particular job.
Admittedly, that can feel difficult, in this current climate of all-consuming hype. Given the phenomenal amount of capital expenditure currently being splurged on delivering AI’s compute and infrastructure, Silicon Valley has a lot riding on us humble mortals suspending our critical faculties – indeed, our disbelief.
So, it’s not hard to see why Big Tech’s proponents might want to dazzle us with the narrative of apparent inevitability. For all that, however, there are other perspectives.
What’s more, in a frenzied marketplace where a myriad of AI solutions are proliferating for no end of problems (real or imagined), a wise customer will always seek to ask critical questions in an effort to peer behind the sales pitch.
On that note, we introduce Dr Eleanor Drage, Senior Research Fellow at Cambridge University’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, where she runs the €1.9m Desirable Digitalisation project, and co-directs the Narratives & Justice Programme, among other roles.
As one of the headline speakers at the Housing Innovation Show in February 2026, she’s all set to take a more critical approach towards AI, offering a powerful and thoughtful contribution to the discussion.
For some, perhaps, that already marks her out as something of a heretic; for others, a much-needed alternative voice amidst a fog of conformity. Drage herself is simply urging a more cautious approach; less blind faith in the hype – and technology’s missionaries – and more informed decision making.
See the full line-up of speakers at the Housing Innovation Show
Drage, as she emphasises, is not anti-AI – she uses it to help produce her podcast, The Good Robot – but she does take issue with the ‘hard sell’ of technological determinism: the notion that the history of the future has, essentially, already been written by a handful of billionaire tech CEOs.
“These [are] pseudo-philosophers who are computer scientists and [they] believe it’s their mission to be ‘high priests’ of the future,” she says. “We’re expected just to waddle through the life set out by these guys on eight, nine-figure salaries.”
Beware of ‘false prophets’, then? For Drage, it’s more about recognising that as a society we have – or ought to have – agency in this; it’s about demanding a “future that we have designed” rather than accepting one from ‘on high’, as it were.
Ethical outlook
Drage’s work is rooted in ethics and the social impact of AI, drawing on philosophy, feminist and gender studies, and political theory, along with practical case studies.
It represents an effort to devise a more grounded and holistic view of what is euphemistically called ‘progress’, often with little to no consideration of the ‘collateral’ consequence for both communities and individuals. In that sense, the focus is on making the implementation of AI safer for everyone in society.
There’s a lot to contend with, of course, when it comes to working out the ethical – as much as the practical – conundrums the technology presents. There’s the geo-political dimension, which may feel far removed from our everyday lives, but nevertheless exerts a powerful influence.
Behind the scenes, as it were, there are the workers undertaking the laborious task of labelling data; there’s the burgeoning demand for raw materials such as silicon and lithium, and components such as GPUs and memory chips; then there’s the data centres themselves, with their high demand for both water and electricity.
“The AI development pipeline is a very precarious one,” Drage says. “The exaggeration of the AI ‘arms race’ and the creation of this animosity with China – these things are scarier, in inverted commas, than AI development turning everyone into paper clips.
“Those kind of animated fantasies have been created by the same people who refuse to build AI ethically, so it’s very difficult to take them seriously. The real issues are the ones that we do have control of.”
A different approach?
As Drage points out, there are alternative forms the technology can take. Currently, as it has come into being, AI is highly centralised; dominated by a handful of corporate giants, only some of which are household names. But she is more interested in how data centres, for instance, can be governed in a decentralised way. Power doesn’t necessarily have to accrue to the centre.
In Germany, for instance, she refers to emerging grassroots models of governance, where municipalities are exploring how local citizens might shape the operations of data centres. It’s not just about accountability, but also about nurturing a connection to the technology itself; making it less of a mysterious ‘box’ of arcane tricks.
Drage illustrated the point with a couple of anecdotes, the first referring to a recent project that asked schoolchildren to imagine what a data centre should look like.
“They drew them like greenhouses,” she says. “We all have this desire to be able to understand the technologies that we’re using, to have a bit more agency, but we can’t do that unless we gain more competence.”
Competence, of course, requires a certain level of understanding and transparency, and possibly the freedom to tinker with the tech. As Drage adds, her grandmother was able to open up a radio and fix it. As she argues, that provided a sense of “intelligence and control”, whereas today we are essentially ‘locked out’ and “estranged” from technology.
“People really understood their technologies, and that’s the greatest problem I have with AI,” she says. “That lack of control is being projected onto AI and our fears of it.”
Drage is equally wary of the increasingly proprietary direction of major AI systems, lamenting a shift from open-source tools to commercial algorithms. The lack of transparency and – as it were – intellectual connectedness ill-serves the development of AI literacy, she suggests.
“This is not a good way to pursue new technology,” she says. Knowledge, as the old saying goes, is power.
Balance of power
Technology, after all, is seldom neutral, and today’s brave new world of LLMs and AI is certainly no different. Among her research interests, then, Drage seeks to explore how technology reinforces, or alleviates imbalances of power, and by extension the many inequalities that blight society.
So, Drage asks, how do we shift power to the marginalised, redistribute intellectual property so that it’s not concentrated in the Global North, and harness the tools of technology so they can be used to economically empower ordinary people? Indeed, how do we redistribute compute more evenly, or create tools that don’t need an internet connection?
“For most of the world, these are the key questions,” she says. The majority of people aren’t thinking about existential risk.
All this may seem far removed from the day-to-day realities of the UK’s social housing sector, as it strives to navigate the practical realities of digital transformation. But for social landlords seeking demonstrable solutions to tangible problems, the balance between scepticism and techno-optimism is very much a live issue. With so much hype out there, it’s critical to stay grounded.
At the end of the day, that’s the kernel of Drage’s argument: don’t be intimidated by AI or its proponents, don’t be afraid to ask hard questions, and trust your own judgement.
“My key message for the housing sector would be to trust your expertise and your gut instincts,” Drage says. “If it feels like magic, that’s probably because it is.”
The Housing Innovation Show takes place on 4-5 February 2026 at the ICC, Birmingham
To find out more, or to register your interest, visit the show’s website here
Main image: ICC photo courtesy of Nick Stafford/Pixabay
Read next: Thinking through the future
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