The Race To Build God: AI's Existential Gamble - Yoshua Bengio & Tristan Harris At Davos
Humannetech, Thursday, February 19th, 2026
This week on Your Undivided Attention, Tristan Harris and Daniel Barcay offer a backstage recap of what it was like to be at the Davos World Economic Forum meeting this year as the world's power brokers woke up to the risks of uncontrolled AI.
Amidst all the money and politics, the Human Change House staged a weeklong series of remarkable conversations between scientists and experts about technology and society. This episode is a discussion between Tristan and Professor Yoshua Bengio, who is considered one of the world's leaders in AI and deep learning, and the most cited scientist in the field.
Yoshua and Tristan had a frank exchange about the AI we're building, and the incentives we're using to train models. What happens when a model has its own goals, and those goals are 'misaligned' with the human-centered outcomes we need? In fact this is already happening, and the consequences are tragic.