Davos 2025: Global safety nets not enough for labour disruptions caused by AI, says AI godfather Yoshua Bengio

Canadia computer scitentist, Yoshua Bengio, dubbed the godfather of AI, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on January 20

Existing global safety nets will not be sufficient to tackle major labour market disruptions caused by artificial intelligence systems, Canadian computer scientist and a pioneer of artificial neural networks and deep learning Yoshua Bengio said.

Bengio who was speaking to Moneycontrol at the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, said, "There is a lot that we don't understand about these systems. We don't how we can control them. So they behave according to the norms and instructions that we give them.

"We haven't also planned how to handle potential major labour market disruptions if these things happen in the coming years. These transitions take time, and our global and national, social safety nets are not going to be sufficient," Ng added.

Bengio's comments come in response, and in context to recent developments such as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying that AI can evolve to the point where it can function as mid-level engineers, capable of writing code independently.

Also read: Davos 2025: Countries that invest in AI systems will have geopolitical advantage, says AI godfather Yoshua Bengio

Recently, various reports said that OpenAI is set to come out with a "super-agent" that will be able to solve Ph.D.-level complex tasks.

These developments give rise to alarms over the potential capability of such systems to replace humans in the workforce.

"There is a lot of noise with companies saying they want to build more autonomous systems -- agentic systems. There is a lot of good commercial reasons because that will allow (them) to replace people in their jobs and that is worth a lot money," Ng said.

"But people should also realise that it is taking a lot of risks. It is autonomy that allows an AI to have its own preservation goals that could potentially be dangerous to us," he warned.

Earlier in the day, while speaking to Moneycontrol at Davos, AI pioneer Andrew Ng advised professionals across sectors to learn coding to stay ahead of the curve. Ng's comments come in response to a question on whether AI can replace humans in the workforce.