AI is 2026's Honey Badger

The debate about AI is over. And somehow, unusually, everyone agrees.

Lauren Berkowitz · Apr 28, 2026

There is a viral video from 2011 that people my age will remember, a nature clip about the honey badger, narrated by someone who is delighted and appalled in equal measure. The honey badger gets stung by bees, bitten by cobras, does not care, eats what it wants, takes what it wants, and keeps moving. The whole joke is its total indifference to obstacles that would stop anything else. I keep thinking about it, because in 2026 that is AI.

AI is the honey badger. It gets sued, it does not care. It gets banned in a jurisdiction, it does not care. It hits a copyright wall, a regulatory wall, a safety concern, a scandal, a skeptical op-ed, and it does not care. It keeps eating, keeps moving, keeps getting into everything. Whatever you think about whether it should, the descriptive fact is that it does, and nothing so far has meaningfully slowed it down.

Here is what is strange about this moment. The debate is over, and everyone agrees, which almost never happens. The optimists think AI is the most important thing to happen to humanity and they are all in. The pessimists think it is dangerous and possibly catastrophic, and they will tell you AI is the most important thing to happen to humanity. Both camps, opposite conclusions, identical premise. Nobody serious is arguing that it does not matter.

That consensus is the real news. For most of the last few years there was a live argument about whether AI was overhyped, a bubble, a party trick that would plateau. That argument has quietly ended. The plateau did not come. The capability kept climbing, the adoption kept spreading, and the people who were skeptical about whether it mattered have mostly moved on to being skeptical about whether it is good, which is a completely different debate.

And the honey badger does not care which debate you are having. While the optimists build and the pessimists warn, the thing itself keeps advancing on its own schedule, indifferent to the discourse about it. This is what makes it so disorienting. The usual pattern with new technology is that the argument about whether it matters resolves slowly, over years. This one resolved fast, and the technology did not wait for the resolution.

The people who feel most lost right now are, I think, the ones still waiting for permission to take it seriously. They are waiting for the consensus to form, not realizing it already has. They are waiting for someone authoritative to say this is real and here to stay, not noticing that the optimists and the pessimists, who agree on nothing else, are both already saying exactly that, in different tones, for different reasons.

There is a version of caution that made sense in 2023, a wait-and-see that was reasonable when it was still possible the whole thing might fizzle. That version has expired. Not because the risks are gone, they are not, and the pessimists are not wrong to name them, but because waiting to see if it matters is no longer a coherent position. It matters. That question is closed. The open questions are all downstream of it.

So the useful reframe is to stop asking whether AI is going to be a big deal and start asking what you do given that it already is. The honey badger is in the yard. It is not leaving. You can be delighted, you can be appalled, you can be both, but the one option that is no longer available is treating it as hypothetical, because the thing about a honey badger is that it does not care whether you were ready for it.

That indifference cuts both ways, and this is the part I hold onto. The technology does not care, but we can. The honey badger has no values, no direction, no sense of what it is for. Those are the parts that are still entirely up to us. The advance is happening regardless, but what it advances toward, what we build with it and what we refuse to, is not decided by the badger. It is decided by us, if we decide to decide it.

That is the whole thing, really. The debate about whether AI matters is over, and both sides won, which means it is time to stop having it. The debate about what we do with something that matters this much and cares this little, that one is just beginning, and it is the only one left worth having.