Will AI save us or damn us?
4/21/202654 min
There are no two letters more disruptive in our time than AI. We’re told it will create employment yet take jobs away; invent life-saving medicines yet enable superviruses; solve the climate crisis yet deepen it. So will it save us or damn us? Is AI the ultimate disruptor?
This conversation, moderated by Nahlah Ayed, was part of the 2026 Charles Bronfman’s “Conversations” series.
Guests in this episode:
Yoshua Bengio is a professor at Université de Montreal. He also has the distinction of being the most-cited living scientist in the world, in any discipline. He’s co-president and scientific director of LawZero, a nonprofit startup dedicated to creating safe AI systems. In 2018, he was a recipient of the Turing Award, often referred to as the Nobel Prize of Computer Science.
Cory Doctorow is a novelist, journalist, technology activist and the author of an astonishing number of books, both nonfiction and fiction. Among them: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It. And the upcoming: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.
Astra Taylor is a documentary filmmaker, cofounder of the Debt Collective, and a writer. Among her books: Democracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, and The People’s Platform, which won the American Book Award. Taylor also delivered the 2023 CBC Massey Lectures called The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
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Nahlah Ayed· Host0:35
[música suave] Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nahlah Ayed. Perhaps no two letters have been more disruptive in our time: AI. We're told it'll create employment, but also take our jobs away. That it'll invent new life-saving medicines or create new super viruses. That it'll solve the climate crisis or just deepen it. So whether it'll save us or damn us, is AI the ultimate disruptor? We asked three eminently qualified people to help answer that question. Our conversation took place in Montreal at an on-stage event held by the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. [aplausos] Yoshua Bengio is professor at Université de Montréal.