Here we go again folks, in our usual toxic mix of technologists first world willful ignorance, moral relativism, and “bought and paid for” integrity, there’s more high-profile resignations in the world of AI safety.

It’s a rare privilege to peer into the abyss and walk away because it’s “hard to truly let our values govern our actions”, but in their resignation from Anthropic, Mrinank Sharma describes the “poly-crisis,” and a “world in peril”  through AI safety work in bioterrorism, transparency, and defenses against dangers of large models.

Then they quit.

In the same week, Zoë Hitzig resigned from OpenAI via The New York Times: “OpenAI Is Making the Mistakes Facebook Made. I Quit.” They left warning about how Facebook-like ads in AI leads to the same user manipulation and harm we’re only now just starting to understand.

And yet, we shrug and move on.

What we’re seeing played out is the same sad story of the structural inadequacies of IT governance when revenue, valuation, and competitive pressures bend values despite some individual’s best intentions.

And yet governments continue to treat AI governance as if it were a future issue rather than a present consumer protection crisis. If they actually cared, they’d learn from their routine enforcement failures where rules are written for yesterday’s technology and viewed as roadblocks to innovation.

There were capital requirements, ratings standards, consumer protection laws, and loads of financial regulations before 2008, but we didn’t have the will and capacity to match the veracity of lobbying for a rapidly expanding risk creeping into every aspect of our lives.

People do what they are rewarded for and clearly when it comes to AI safety, the incentives are already entrenched and if past behavior is the best prediction of future behavior, time is running out for regulation and oversight to matter in any meaningful way.

These resignations are leading indicators of a system under stress careening towards a familiar pattern of abuse where industry creates a problem that hurts real people and those who knew are either paid too much to care, fired, or wander off to study poetry.

Meanwhile, society gets stuck with the bill…