Thank you to all the witnesses for your opening testimony.
I'd like to begin by first acknowledging something that I think we can all agree on, which is that AI is certainly a powerful tool. It's already causing a lot of benefits for Canadians—everything from cancer diagnostics to better crop management for our farmers to productivity tools that could be used by our companies to compete globally. That said, with AI and, more importantly, with these large language models, generative AI and recent breakthroughs in agentic AI, I think it's important that we as government fully understand these implications and what our responsibilities are.
Professor Bengio, I'd like to start with you.
You've warned that we're racing toward AI that's smarter than humans without knowing exactly how we can control it safely. We had individuals at our last sessions of this committee who were asked, when they peek behind the curtain, what insiders are saying about this. They joked and said that they're saying we'll be able to take longer vacations because jobs will disappear.
If you poll them, most Canadians believe that AI will destroy far more jobs than it creates. Right now, this isn't a problem that a lot of governments are actively talking about.
Maybe you can help frame this for us. A lot of people, when they think about artificial intelligence, really think about chatbot AI. When you speak about AI as a mechanism that will replace a lot of jobs, it means something different. Can you talk about these differences briefly for us, please?