AI: An Existential Risk for Humanity?

About the Event

Organized annually by Printemps numérique, MTL connecte: Montreal Digital Week is a major international gathering dedicated to the digital revolution and its societal, economic, and cultural transformations. Bringing together researchers, entrepreneurs, creators, and public decision-makers, the event serves as a crossroads to examine emerging digital paradigms through an inclusive, multidisciplinary, and human-centric lens.

The 2026 edition’s Artificial Intelligence track explores breakthrough advancements across industries while critically interrogating key ethical dimensions—ranging from governance, bias, and algorithmic transparency to labor market impacts and long-term societal alignment.

Panel: AI: An Existential Risk for Humanity?

Could artificial intelligence one day escape human control to the point of posing an existential threat to humanity? Once relegated to science fiction, this question now deeply divides researchers, entrepreneurs, and AI practitioners.

For some, the accelerating pace of AI capabilities, increasing autonomy, and our persistent inability to fully interpret the inner workings of frontier models justify taking loss-of-control scenarios seriously. For others, focusing on existential risk diverts attention from urgent, well-documented, and immediate harms, or relies on theoretical assumptions too speculative to warrant slowing down technological progress.

In a structured debate format, panelists confront their analyses and perspectives around a central question: how far should we be concerned about the future capabilities of AI?

Key Themes:

• Distinguishing risks: Disentangling empirically demonstrated harms from speculative worst-case scenarios;
• Controllability: Whether increasingly powerful autonomous systems can be reliably steered and governed;
• Policy and development: Deciding whether to slow the race, reinforce regulatory guardrails, or fundamentally rethink how architectures are designed;
• Societal trade-offs: Gauging what level of systemic risk our societies are truly prepared to accept.

Panelists:

• Philippe Beaudoin, Visiting Industry Researcher, Vector Institute
• Ravy Por, Deloitte
• Bruno Guglielminetty, Mon Carnet

Links

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