Yoshua Bengio

And that other emotion was the love of my children.

I realized that it wasn't clear if they would have a life 20 years from now, if they would live in a democracy 20 years from now.

And

Having realized this and continuing on the same path was impossible.

It was unbearable, even though that meant going against the fray, against the wishes of my colleagues who would rather not hear about the dangers of what we were doing.

Unbearable.

Yeah.

I remember one particular afternoon and I was taking care of my grandson, who was just a bit more than a year old.

How could I not take this seriously?

you know, our children are so vulnerable.

So you know that something bad is coming, like a fire is coming to your house and you see, you're not sure if it's going to pass by and leave your house untouched or if it's going to destroy your house and you have your children in your house.

Do you sit there and continue business as usual?

You can't.

You have to do anything in your power to try to mitigate the risks.

this is a case where previous generations of scientists have talked about a notion called the precautionary principle.

So what it means is that if you're doing something, say a scientific experiment, and it could turn out really, really bad, like people could die, some catastrophe could happen, then you should not do it.

For the same reason,

There are experiments that scientists are not doing right now.

We're not playing with the atmosphere to try to fix climate change because we might create more harm than actually fixing the problem.

We are not creating new forms of life that could destroy us all, even though it's something that is now conceived by biologists because the risks are so huge.