A world without safe haven

Britain used to be the aspirational destination for ambitious young Australians—including my parents—but that is no longer true, and Australia has been merrily brain-draining Britain for some time now. Our move is perfectly rational in economic terms.

But there is another reason for leaving, one that is more difficult to say out loud. I’m not only unhappy with how things are right now in Britain, I’m worried that they’re set to get a whole lot worse.
Louise Perry, WSJ, 1/7/26 While listening to this rather good podcast featuring Peter McCormack interviewing Nate Soares, the lesser-known co-author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: The Case Against Superintelligent AI, I was reminded of the fact that it’s those who know the most about AI who are most worried about it.

He wasn’t mentioned by name, but McCormack and Soares referenced the decision of 29-year-old Mrinank Sharma to quit his job as head of Anthropic’s safeguards research team at the start of this year and pursue a career as a poet.

Sharma has a PhD in Machine Learning from Oxford and was, one presumes, well-positioned to become an extremely wealthy man. So why quit your job and move back to the UK to throw yourself into the (famously poorly remunerated) poetry game?

Well, Sharma didn’t quite say that he expects the world to end soon, meaning people may as well pursue their bucket-list dreams in whatever time they have left.

But he didn’t NOT say the world is about to end.

In his much-viewed resignation letter (he posted it on X), Sharma wrote that he faced “pressures to set aside what matters most” at Anthropic, declared “the world is in peril,” and said he intended to “devote myself to the practice of courageous speech”.

As Soares pointed out, Sharma is hardly the lone ranger when it comes to people involved in the AI industry recoiling in horror at what they see coming. And deciding to “live their best life” in whatever time they believe they have left before AI upends the world (i.e. the next 1-2 years).

I was reminded of Sharma when I read Anglo-Australian Louise Perry’s Wall Street Journal column this morning about why she’s leaving the UK to return to her parents’ homeland.

The tl;dr is that her beloved Great Britain is no longer so great and she’s worried enough about it rapidly degenerating into a shithole country to uproot herself, her husband and her children and move halfway across the world.

Eyeing the exit
Perry has become an independent and, more recently, legacy media star for several reasons. But the main one is that she is – in a learned, temperate and often charming manner – courageous enough to question progressive orthodoxies. She’s best known for The Case Against the Sexual Revolution (2022).

I’m yet to read it, but I gather it makes the point that the deregulation of the sexual marketplace – which swept aside the ‘sexual socialism’ of the pre-Pill era – had much the same impact as the deregulation of many other marketplaces in recent decades. That is, it was an absolute bonanza for high-status men but a disaster for mid-to-low-status ones. Unless they’re content being a member of a high-status man’s harem, things don’t seem to have worked out too well for most women under the new dispensation either.

With some hesitation, Perry honestly explains why she’s emigrating.

[Professor David Betz] uses established models and ideas within the discipline of war studies to predict that Britain and France are the Western countries most likely to experience the outbreak of a violent civil conflict that would be fought primarily along ethnic lines. Such conflicts would be the product of economic stress, lost political legitimacy, indigestible levels of immigration from culturally distant places and a sense of “downgrade” among a native population that feels itself to be losing power and status. Britain is, says Mr. Betz, “explosively configured”…

Nothing that has happened since 2024 has made me feel more confident about Britain’s trajectory. Since then, we have seen more outbreaks of race rioting and increased political instability. And, all the while, experts warn that the government is borrowing and spending way beyond its means, with welfare spending exceeding income tax revenue. This economic pain will be intensified by the loss to emigration of both the wealthy and the youthful which seems to be under way. A poorer Britain is hardly likely to be a more peaceful Britain.

Perry is torn both by her decision to abandon ship and her choice not to sugarcoat the reasons for doing so.

If Britons with the means to leave start to do so at scale, then a crisis of mass emigration could be at hand.

Some in Britain will accuse me of cowardice and treachery, not only for leaving, but also for writing about it and thereby encouraging others to do the same. I did think seriously about drawing a veil over my own emigration, and never publicly explaining why we had done it. But people kept asking, and I grew tired of not telling the whole truth. My defense is that we wouldn’t have left if it weren’t for our children.

I have both good and bad news for Perry. She is correct in observing that Australia is a richer, better-functioning and generally safer, happier and more optimistic place than the UK.

The bad news is that, like the rest of the Anglosphere, Australia has been heading down the same path as the UK for decades, and is only a few paces behind it.

In the UK, one-fifth of the population is foreign-born. In Australia, it’s a third of the population. While it’s true that the Muslim sectarianism Perry is so nervous about is less of an issue in Australia, it’s hardly non-existent. As events at Bondi Beach seven months ago demonstrated.

As Perry is no doubt aware, the backlash against mass migration and multiculturalism in Australia is now so fierce that the Antipodean Farage, Pauline Hanson, might end up Prime Minister if an election were called today. The fissures might not be quite as wide as they’ve become in the Motherland, but Australia is beset by the same class, ethnic and generational conflicts – as well as the same collapsing fertility, ageing population, unaffordable housing, falling real incomes, elite failure, and fraying social contract – driving people like Perry to follow Peter Hitchens’ famous advice and flee a failing state before it is too late.

There is no sanctuary, even for Masters of the Universe
A few years ago, there was a trend of Silicon Valley heavy-hitters purchasing properties in New Zealand.

Before deciding Milei’s Argentina would be more convivial, Peter Thiel did this. Apparently, doomsday bunker manufacturer Rising S Company has long been doing a roaring trade supplying underground ‘private shelters’ to the far-flung “bug-out locations” of the tech industry’s heavy hitters.

In a viral New Yorker article entitled Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman estimated more than 50 per cent of Silicon Valley billionaires had “apocalypse insurance” and commented, “Saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more. Once you’ve done the Masonic handshake, they’ll be, like, ‘Oh, you know, I have a broker who sells old ICBM silos.’”

But here’s the problem, whether you’re an Anglo-Australian public intellectual worried about ethno-religious strife in the UK or a Silicon Valley plutocrat worried about societal collapse unleashed by the technology you’ve made a fortune from – there is ultimately no escape.

Yes, you can move from one Anglosphere country to another, but you’ll find they all have pretty much the same problems. Unsurprisingly, given all have followed much the same policies for the last half-century.

Yes, you can get that shock-collared pilot to fly your Gulfstream to your New Zealand bolthole. However, sooner or later, you’ll want or need to leave your doomsday bunker. If there’s no functioning society above ground, you and your loved ones are unlikely to survive long.

The take-home message isn’t that it’s foolish to have – and, if necessary, execute on – a contingency plan to avoid immediate peril.

It’s that unless people are willing to do the real work of redirecting the bus currently headed for the cliff edge, any reprieve is likely to be temporary.