Yoshua Bengio

speaker

2,216 appearances 5 recordings 5 series first heard Oct 2018 last heard 7 May

Yoshua Bengio’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #243 – 'Godfather of AI' Yoshua Bengio: "I now see a path" to safe superintelligent AI · 7 May 2026 podcast

So the context here for me is what kind of future is going to be stable and not turn into a global dictatorship driven by AI and excessive concentration of power, in addition to avoiding catastrophic loss of control and catastrophic misuse and all those things that can come from very powerful AI.

I think that because of the game theory dilemmas, basically prisoner's dilemma style problems that make companies and countries go and take decisions that are the rational ones, but that they're globally bad, like basically cutting corner on safety and the public good in order to stay in the race.

Because of this, it would be much better if we ended up in a world where

the power of controlling very strong AI is not centralized in the hands of one or two companies or one or two governments, but is instead distributed.

So what do I mean by this?

How do you make sure no one person, no one company and no one government has too much power, all of the power in the extreme case?

There's a very old idea, it's called democracy.

That's what it's about, right?

I don't think that our current democratic institutions are robust enough to deal with those changes, but the principles are there.

The principle

To be maybe more concrete, imagine that you had a coalition of countries which together decide to develop AI safely and for the benefit of humanity and not to dominate each other.

That will be a much, much better and safer world because you break this competition problem that we are currently locked in.

Now, what that would mean is the...

control, I mean, it could involve companies, but on top of the companies, you need to have representatives of the people, like governments.

And you don't want a single government because a single government can be corrupted by power and the power that AI can give, right?

So you want something maybe like a coalition of governments who make a treaty about those things with verification, for example, so that they can

even if they don't trust each other, they can prefer the treaty than no treaty.

So the reason I'm bringing this up with respect to your question is I think it would be a better world if it is a bunch of governments

which fund the most advanced AI systems.

I mean, they could work with companies, of course, but I think ultimately we would like the decision power to be at the level of governments, but not a single government, because then we're back to the grabbing the power.

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