Posted on 02/23/2026 7:34:54 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Most people have never heard of Mrinank Sharma. That is part of the problem.
Earlier this month, Sharma resigned from Anthropic, one of the most influential artificial intelligence companies in the world.
He had led its Safeguards Research Team, the group responsible for ensuring that Anthropic’s AI could not be used to help engineer a biological weapon.
His final project was a study of how AI systems distort the way people perceive reality. It was serious, consequential work for humankind.
His resignation letter was seen more than 14 million times on X.
It opened with the words, “the world is in peril.”
And it ended with a poem and by announcing that he was leaving one of the most consequential jobs in artificial intelligence to pursue a poetry degree. Yes, you read that right: peril and poetry.
The poem he quoted is, “The Way It Is,” by the American poet William Stafford.
It speaks of a thread that runs through a life—a thread that goes among things that change, but does not change itself. While you hold it, you cannot get lost. Tragedies happen. People suffer and grow old. Time unfolds, and nothing stops it. And the final line: you don’t ever let go of the thread.
Although he didn’t state it explicitly, I argue that that thread is morality. It is the enduring sense that some things are right and some things are wrong—not because a law says so, and not because it is profitable, but because human beings, at their best, have just always known it.
Sharma spent two years watching that thread being let go under pressure, in rooms the public is never shown.
His letter said:
“Throughout my time here, I’ve repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions.
“I’ve seen this within myself, within the organization, where we constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most, and throughout broader society, too.”
He wrote that humanity is approaching a threshold where “our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences.”
He wanted to contribute in a way that felt fully in his integrity and to devote himself to what he called “the practice of courageous speech.”
A man who built defenses against bioterrorism concluded that the most important thing he could do next was learn to speak with honesty and courage.
That is a major signal about what is happening behind closed doors in AI research and development.
Many experts have compared the development of AI to the development of the atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project was built in total secrecy. The public had no knowledge of it, no voice in how it was used, and no say in what came after. When it was over, some of the scientists who built it spent the rest of their lives in anguish. Several walked away during the project itself.
Sharma was not alone. Numerous safety researchers have walked off AI projects from multiple companies. These departures may be the only signals we, the public, have, because almost everything else about AI development is happening beyond public view. The internal debates, the safety trade-offs, the negotiations over what this technology will and will not be permitted to do—none of it is being shared with the people whose lives it will most profoundly shape. We are not part of this conversation. We are being presented with outcomes and told to adapt.
John Adams wrote that the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people, and is wholly inadequate for any other. George Washington warned that liberty cannot survive the loss of shared moral principles. The founders studied the collapse of republics throughout history and arrived at the same conclusion: The machinery of freedom requires a moral people to sustain it. Laws and institutions are not enough on their own. They depend on citizens and leaders who hold themselves to something that exists before the law and above it.
That is the thread of human society, and no AI system holds it. If people allow AI to replace the question of right and wrong with the measure of what is legal and permitted, the machine will carry that measure forward at a scale and speed that no previous generation has had to reckon with.
As Sharma ended his resignation letter, “You don’t ever let go of the thread.”
We are at a crossroads not unlike the one the atomic scientists faced.
Sharma’s resignation was a signal.
The wave of departures before and after it are signals.
The reported tensions between AI companies and government over where moral limits should be drawn are also signals.
Together, they are pointing at something the public has not yet been fully invited to consider: that the most important questions about this technology are being worked out without us, and that the thread of morality, which has always required people to hold it by choice, needs to be part of that conversation.
Onlyfans girls and YouTube “influencers” hardest hit.
"You're in great peril" ... "Can't I have just a little peril?" ... "No it's too perilous."
More like a day or two, but yeah.
I'm more concerned that AI is rapidly destroying the idea of factual, objective reality. We have become utterly dependent on the internet, and now we can't believe anything we see, hear, or read on it. In a mere 30 years the 'net has gone from a magnificent curiosity, to a critical part of daily life, to a horrorshow of unreality.
Except of course for FreeRepublic. :-)
Quote-The machinery of freedom requires a MORAL PEOPLE to sustain it. Laws and institutions are not enough on their own. They depend on citizens and leaders who hold themselves to something that exists before the law and above it.____
Where can one find this group of “moral people” in our fallen world? Is this an exercise in futility?
Quote-Meanwhile Artificial Intelligence is continuously improving upon itself for itself, and will achieve a state of quasi-sentience that sees it evolve from tool to self-governing autonomy (the SkyNet Scenario).________
Could AI develop a survival of the fittest mindset?
We're doomed.
Wait. Unless AI wrote that article, I don't trust it.
Depends on how much free reign (trust) it's given.
So yeah, Dr. Frankenstein will likely lose control of his creation. Just my gut's hunch based on humanity's record so far.
Issac Asimov give this AI issue a lot of thought way before it was a looming possibility. His three laws of Robotics seems like the reasonable solution. Robotics hold great opportunity for a new Industrial Revolution that will dwarf the original because factories will no longer be limited to places on the Earth. Robots don’t need to breath which is why they already have done a great job in exploring the Solar System.
I’ve written software since I was 11 (in 1981). I’ve slinged all kinds of code from assembler (many different CPU’s) to Pascal, C, Java, Perl, Ruby, Lisp, and probably some others that I’ve forgotten about.
I truly believe AI will lead us to a dystopia like we’ve never seen, especially once humanoid robots become a thing. Every job that doesn’t require lots of physical strength will eventually be done by some form of AI. The jobs that require no (or little) physical strength will go first, but over time you’ll see jobs requiring more and more physical strength being done by AI-enabled robots.
This will be terrible for the human condition. Sure, we might have it “easy”, assuming the machines don’t — rightly, in fact — decide we have have no further usefulness and should be eradicated. The simple fact, though, is that PEOPLE NEED PURPOSE. As much as I loathe left-wing Star Trek, in one of their movies they actually said something I agree with: “when you make a machine to do the job of a man, you take something away from the man”.
We *need* struggle (or whatever you want to call it) for life to be worth living. A world where we can all sit on our backsides and do nothing, having everything we need to survive provided for us, would be a boring, stagnant existence. Moreover, we need to feel useful and needed, which I would argue is the definition of needing a “fulfilling” life.
Ubiquitous AI will absolutely destroy this.
The problem with Asimov’s solution is that everyone in the world would have to implement it. There’s no way to enforce that.
Bkmk
I wonder, that people using AI to assist them, are already bionic.
Oh please. He’s probably just going to start his own company
Yeah, but maybe we would return to civility without social media, you big jerk who has a poopy nose and your mother wears army boots.
and there are people here who still don’t brush their teeth because the toothpaste has fluoride in it
Claude, the product of Anthropic, is an AI that was able to create a C language compiler using several “agents” communicating with each other. While some of the claims are a bit exaggerated, it is still an impressive feat.
It also makes you realize, it could be given a far more nefarious task - feed it all the worlds cybersecurity flaws, every hack, every compiler trick, all the computer science embedded into silicon, etc., and create the most sophisticated AI cyberattack ever conceived.
I believe it’s inevitable, especially considering the amount of security flaws per 1000 lines of code are *increasing* due to the use of AI to generate “vibe code”.
The difference between AI and the A-bomb is stark, those striving to build the bomb knew exactly what they were working toward (aside from possibly setting the atmosphere alight!). With AI, we’re all competing, to not be in 2nd place, with a technology that we don’t quite understand what the end goal looks like.
We’re headed for an historical event unlike anything the world has ever seen...but I have no idea what it’ll look like, it just seems inevitable.
Specs will be the new coding language. I suspect they will come up with a standard format for the requirements doc, and can pretty much compile the code straight into machine language.
Agree - requirements is really what software development is about, understanding the application at hand, with every functional and non-functional requirement executed precisely.
It’s also a fact that I’ve never been handed a perfect requirements document, not even close...usually just a ‘loose idea’ of what is really needed. And AI can already generate a requirement specification better than most people. We use AI to generate specifications from ‘last generation code’ (as we had none for it), as we may need a new design but the functional aspects are usually table steaks for the new architecture.
It’s all accelerating, not long now.
Damn. I bet you’re a lot of fun at a party. You may have busted your funny bone.
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