<p>There are no two letters more disruptive in our time than AI. We’re told it will create employment yet take jobs away; invent life-saving medicines yet enable superviruses; solve the climate crisis yet deepen it. So will it save us or damn us? Is AI the ultimate disruptor?</p><p><br></p><p>This conversation, moderated by Nahlah Ayed, was part of the 2026 Charles Bronfman’s “Conversations” series.</p><p><br></p><p>Guests in this episode:</p><p><br></p><p>Yoshua Bengio is a professor at Université de Montreal. He also has the distinction of being the most-cited living scientist in the world, in any discipline. He’s co-president and scientific director of LawZero, a nonprofit startup dedicated to creating safe AI systems. In 2018, he was a recipient of the Turing Award, often referred to as the Nobel Prize of Computer Science.</p><p><br></p><p>Cory Doctorow is a novelist, journalist, technology activist and the author of an astonishing number of books, both nonfiction and fiction. Among them:<em> Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It</em>. And the upcoming: <em>The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI</em>.</p><p><br></p><p>Astra Taylor is a documentary filmmaker, cofounder of the Debt Collective, and a writer. Among her books: <em>Democracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone</em>, and <em>The People’s Platform</em>, which won the American Book Award. Taylor also delivered the 2023 CBC Massey Lectures called<em> The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart.</em></p>