AI Summit: Governments are not doing anything about job loss concerns, says Godfather of AI Yoshua Bengio

Canadian computer scientist and a pioneer of artificial neural networks and deep learning Yoshua Bengio

Governments around the world are not doing enough to allay concerns people have around job losses, Canadian computer scientist and a pioneer of artificial neural networks and deep learning Yoshua Bengio, told Moneycontrol in an interview.

Bengio along with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun are together called the Godfathers of AI. In 2019, they won the prestigious Turing Award for their pioneering contributions to deep learning, the technology underpinning modern AI systems.

“Governments are not doing anything about it (job loss concerns). They're talking about reskilling, but the people who are losing their job will be losing their job in the next year or two. They are not the same people who are getting jobs in (the) machine learning industry. So that's that's a real problem,” Bengio said while speaking at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in Delhi.

Over the longer term, as time passes, more and more jobs are going to be automated

“So that's a real problem. We don't have a global solution to this, companies don't really have an answer to this,” he said.

His comments even as some companies and governments say that jobs will only evolve and will not necessarily eliminate human intervention. However, for the ones impacted, the distortion is going to be uneven which complicates the solution even more.

“It (the solution) has to be that the wealth that will be created by AI is somehow redistributed. Now, what makes it complicated is that the wealth may be created in some countries (but) jobs lost in another country. A global redistribution (plan) is right now out of sight, but I don't see a stable world where we don't deal with those problems,” Bengio told Moneycontrol.

There is no clear estimate on how many jobs will be impacted because of AI, and across which industries as the industry continues to mature.

Even AI labs, which are focusing on AI-led solutions, are not doing deep enough research in fields such as healthcare and more.

“Unfortunately, there's so much pressure, so much competition, commercial pressure to deliver in the short term that they (AI labs) are focusing on the immediate sales and revenues and benchmarks where they compare against other companies. (They are) not investing enough in the ways that AI could be useful for society, whether it is in medicine or dealing with climate or education,” Bengio said.

“So, that's a place where either governments do the investments themselves or they put the right incentives to encourage companies in that direction,” he concluded.