Cognitive surrender for productivity?
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2026
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It's unclear from the article what exactly he did wrong. There's nothing wrong with using AI as long as you triple check the info it gives you.
The main problem we're facing today with this tech is people thinking it's magically perfect and can operate without human supervision. Was that what he was doing?
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There are few people I trust more than Hank Green when it comes to something like AI.
His recent history puts him at the bottom of the list of people I would trust regarding AI.
I don't generally click on random YouTube videos unless more information is provided, but I give this one a gamble. It was pretty well done and I appreciate the creators overall point and evidence. For anyone else in the comments, I think there are two couple of second long clips of Hank Green that are used to make a larger point about what are essentially attempts at normalizing AI.
Right after posting this, I stumbled on basically a text version of the same sentiment. I can understand not wanting to trust a random YouTube video, even if it is about a guy who most people know due to his own YouTube videos.
The post being: https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/hank-green-and-the-fantastical-tales-of-god-ais/
Echo the other commenter, wow this dude can write.
It's sad, I noticed this too. I excitedly clicked a Hank Green video about energy and water usage on datacenters and was SUPER disappointed in it. I've worked in energy generation as an engineer for a while, and some of the takes in that video were so obviously big tech's doomerism rhetoric
Wow, this guy can write. When I got to “The Ghost Stories of Savannah”, I thought for moment that it was an unnecessary detour - then I saw it.
Ok, I watched up until he started comparing the development of "AI", as he calls it, to the development of nuclear fission technology, and that's where I got fed up. Is generative AI as "impactful" as a nuclear weapon detonation over a city? This guy says no, but I don't know how you can possibly compare the two. LLMs are great at manipulating information, they aren't high-energy explosives. There's no common definition of "impactful" that meaningfully puts the two technologies on the same scale of comparison. They're just different.
And why does it matter, anyway? Is "nuclear weapons" the bar for when we should start caring about impactful technologies? I think not. Generative AI is an informational monster born of the internet and it is unique to it, and that is a huge problem given that the internet is quickly becoming the defacto medium of communication for groups over a certain size. We should be taking it seriously, full stop. I'm less interested in ranking it alongside other catastrophic technologies.
I think we haven't seen the full potential of generative AI yet, and I fear it may be quite destructive (more destructive) if we can't engineer our way around the dead internet that it was created to usher in. I think we should be trying to learn about it, how it works, how it may evolve, and how to have a usable internet alongside it.
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