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The AI Question that No AI Person Asks

2026-04-24 · letter vlog · Hank · 8:43 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Internet & YouTube (also: US politics & society, Global development) · mode: Personal essay

While John visits the Maternal Center of Excellence, Hank argues that AI fails his 'shelter bench' test: housing and TB persist not for lack of intelligence but because those who need help lack power; intelligence, now abundant, is not wisdom, and no one knows whether AI will let wisdom flourish.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — John at the Maternal Center of Excellence; Shelter Bench: AI cannot solve the housing crisis, a problem of landowners' power

  • ★★ Hank says John is in Sierra Leone visiting the Maternal Center of Excellence; they were just texting, and Hank can't wait to see more of it. — 00:00:00 · John Green, Sierra Leone, Maternal Center of Excellence
  • ★★ Hank thinks AI is a big deal that is going to change a lot of things. — 00:00:00

  • ★★★ When someone says AI will change everything and solve all problems, Hank checks it against a benchmark he created, Shelter Bench: how will AI help solve the housing crisis? — 00:00:00 · Shelter Bench

    “We're going to call it shelter bench.”

  • ★★★ Hank calls the lack of housing people want where they want it one of the big problems underlying many others in America, worse where he lives than elsewhere. — 00:00:36 · United States

  • ★★★ Hank says AI does very poorly on that benchmark, and finds it strange that nobody asks how AI, if it is such a big deal, solves the big problems. — 00:00:36 · Shelter Bench
  • ★★ AI might help a little at the margin (faster permitting, cheaper code review or design), but that is not what blocks US housing; nobody thinks the problem lacks intelligence. — 00:01:09
  • ★★★ Hank says the lion's share of the housing problem is that landowners have power over their area and many reasons to prevent new, especially denser, housing. — 00:01:09
  • ★★ Their reasons: they don't want more traffic, fear change, expect a few new neighbors they won't like, and their property values benefit from scarcity. — 00:01:38
  • ★★ Nobody thinks AI will fix that: it is like saying steam engines will fix hurricanes, problems in different universes. (playful) — 00:01:38

00:02:07 — TB Bench: TB solutions exist; those who need resources lack power over them

  • ★★★ AI might even make housing worse by further concentrating wealth, since intense inequality creates incentives to serve only the wealthiest consumers. (hedged) — 00:02:07 · economic inequality
  • ★★★ On what he calls TB Bench, Hank says TB kills more than a million people a year and its deaths have been preventable for decades, so intelligence is not the problem. — 00:02:07 · tuberculosis
  • ★★ AI help with diagnostic imaging, new antibiotics or surveillance modeling would be great but would not solve TB: solutions exist, and they need institutions that want the outcomes and can execute. — 00:02:37 · tuberculosis
  • ★★★ Both cases share one problem: the people who need help or resources have no power over them; people who need housing have no sway in a community they don't live in. — 00:02:37 · tuberculosis

00:03:06 — The transformative-technology non sequitur; intelligence redefined as power over information

  • ★★★ The transformative-technology story (the tech is powerful; powerful tech transforms society; so it will solve our biggest problems) is a non sequitur: only transformation follows, in unclear ways. — 00:03:06
  • ★★ Some people still think AI is a scam; to Hank that is obviously not what is going on. — 00:03:06
  • ★★ Hank says intelligence can be defined so that a lot of it, spread among many people who have power, would help solve the housing crisis, but he is using a definition that could not. — 00:03:06

  • ★★★ Hank has lately thought of intelligence as power over information: as physical power manipulates atoms, intelligence is the ability to manipulate information. — 00:03:54

    “I have lately been thinking about intelligence as like power over information.”

  • ★★ By that definition crows, single-celled organisms and maybe search engines manipulate information: not intelligent, but they might have intelligence. (hedged) — 00:04:52

  • ★★★ Even without AI we have far more, potentially very cheap, ability to manipulate information than before; that is very powerful, and nobody knows what it means. — 00:04:52

00:05:34 — Intelligence versus wisdom; a wisdom-constrained world; AI as a big technological shift like the internet

  • ★★★ Intelligence is separate from wisdom, and Hank doesn't think we have a way to mass-produce wisdom. — 00:05:34

  • ★★★ Perhaps during Hank's lifetime the world has been moving from intelligence-constrained to wisdom-constrained, a transition still under way. (hedged) — 00:05:34

    “from a world that was intelligence-constrained to one that is wisdom-constrained”

  • ★★ Hank says we live in an intelligence-constrained world, so with more intelligence a lot of things will get created that otherwise would not. — 00:05:34

  • ★★★ Intelligence helps you get what you want; wisdom helps you want the right things, pick problems worth solving and solve them without creating worse ones. — 00:06:03
  • ★★ Designing a more effective slot machine applies intelligence, not wisdom. — 00:06:03
  • ★★★ Hank sees no reason to think making intelligence extremely efficient would change the power dynamics behind an unjust world; it might help, hurt or both, and is impossible to know. — 00:06:03
  • ★★ Hank sees some concentration of power from AI as somewhat inevitable, but maybe not. (hedged) — 00:06:32
  • ★★★ AI is a genuinely big technological shift, as were the internet and personal computing, which did not solve the housing crisis; leaping steps ahead is pointless since nobody can predict. — 00:06:58

00:07:28 — A cancer drug is easier to make than to deliver; will AI let wisdom flourish; message to the MCOE and sign-off

  • ★★★ It will obviously be easier for AI to create a cancer drug than to get it to everyone who needs it; both are problems, since cancer is unaffected by a drug not given. — 00:07:28 · cancer
  • ★★★ AI is clearly powerful, but no one can know its impacts: will it let wisdom flourish, or let the powerful route around wisdom as they tend to? Hank doesn't know. (unsure) — 00:07:58
  • ★ Hank hopes John is having a good trip and asks him to tell everyone at the Maternal Center of Excellence that their work really matters. — 00:07:58 · John Green, Maternal Center of Excellence

In the description and comments

  • ★★ The description says Hank has no idea whether AI significantly changes the structure of these problems: it might help, hurt, or change nothing. (unsure) — video description
  • ★★ The description says big problems stay big not for lack of know-how but because they escape the attention of those able to solve them, or solving them is against their interests. — video description
  • ★★ The description says Hank would be very surprised if AI helped solve this, though he has been surprised before. (hedged) — video description
  • ★ The description links a video by Nilay. — video description
  • ★ In a channel comment Hank rejects the idea that owners keep units intentionally empty: unrented buildings earn nothing, and high-rent places have very low vacancy rates. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: artificial intelligence · housing crisis · Intelligence · Shelter Bench · tuberculosis · wisdom

Also: Organizations: Maternal Center of Excellence

Concepts: cancer · crow · economic inequality · Internet · microorganism · NIMBY · steam engine

Places: Sierra Leone · United States

Only in the description or credits: Nilay Patel

Also centred on artificial intelligence: Google in your Brain · Question Tuesday Except I'm an AI · Asking an AI Image Generator for Pizza Johns · AI tells me if AI will write novels. · Things are Changing Very Fast · After 12 hours in LA I'm a stand-up comic doing ASMR with a side gig as a music promoter

Also centred on housing crisis: Three Whole Onions with Secretary Pete Buttigieg · My Governor is Weirder than Yours

Also centred on Intelligence: Gene Editing and Intelligence: A Bad

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