Governments around the world are not doing enough to address concerns about AI-led job losses, Canadian computer scientist Yoshua Bengio said in an interview with Moneycontrol on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in Delhi.
“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 a real problem,” Bengio said.
He added that over the longer term, automation will expand across more sectors.
“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 remarks come amid claims from some companies and governments that AI will transform rather than eliminate jobs. Bengio said the disruption is likely to be uneven, complicating policy responses.
“It 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,” he said.
There is currently no clear estimate of how many jobs could be impacted or which industries would be most affected, as AI technologies continue to evolve.
Bengio also said AI laboratories are not investing sufficiently in socially beneficial applications such as healthcare, climate and education.
“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,” he said.
He added that governments may need to step in.
“So, that’s a place where either governments do the investments themselves or they put the right incentives to encourage companies in that direction,” Bengio said.
Bengio, widely regarded as one of the “Godfathers of AI” alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, won the Turing Award in 2019 for pioneering contributions to deep learning, the technology that underpins modern artificial intelligence systems.