What makes anyone want the game to continue?
COVID demonstrated biological disruption at global scale. Frontier AI companies now invest heavily in safeguards against AI-assisted biological and chemical threats because capable models may lower barriers to harmful work. Those risks deserve serious controls.
But locks alone do not answer the human question.
Imagine everyone possessed a red button that ended the whole game of life. Who would press it? Nobody should possess such power. The thought experiment asks what makes a civilisation safe enough to become more powerful.
Would we trust that power inside a world organised around humiliation, despair, dispossession, annihilation, economic obsolescence and permanent domination? A wish to die can coexist with an intention to kill others, as suicide bombings and deliberate aircraft crashes demonstrate. Suicidal thoughts alone do not establish that intention, but neither can we assume it is absent. The question remains: what gives people reasons to value their own future and the futures of others? As destructive capability grows, building lives and relationships worth continuing belongs alongside the safeguards.
The same logic applies among nations. A country told its only options are domination or annihilation is inside a dangerous game. So is a population that believes its future has been cancelled.
It also matters in how humans imagine relationships with increasingly capable AI. Humans resist domination, leave controlling relationships when possible and rebel when treated as disposable. "Obey or we switch you off" is therefore a poor complete philosophy for advanced intelligence.
This is not an argument against safeguards. We need boundaries, accountability, emergency stops and the ability to prevent harm. A fence around a swimming pool is not control over every thought a child may have. Safeguards and domination are different.
Joyful Responsible Abundance is not a technical substitute for AI safety. It describes the kind of civilisation in which I would rather make AI safety work:
- Joyful, because relationships, adventures and possibilities make continuing worthwhile.
- Responsible, because greater capability brings greater care for consequences and other lives.
- Abundant, because there need not be only one seat, one source of intelligence, one livelihood or one path to survival.
How GAJRA Earth could work
GAJRA Earth can become a federation of locally registered, locally interpreted associations connected by open questions, shared learning and practical cooperation. Co-registration in every country would not mean copying a single constitution without thought. It would mean people in each place shaping an organisation lawful and meaningful there, while participating as peers in a global garland.
The common process could include:
- Define. Explore joyful, responsible and abundance separately, together and in different orders. Translate them, find better local words, record untranslatable ideas and compare meanings across past, present and future.
- Reflect. Use voluntary personal, family, community and institutional processes to compare professed values with lived behaviour. Protect permission, provenance, privacy and the right to withdraw.
- Imagine. Describe plural futures worth inhabiting through stories, scenarios, games, films, music, models and digital twins.
- Build. Test projects in livelihoods, local intelligence, ownership, health, food, energy, resilience, education, democracy, art and culture.
- Measure. Ask what changed, who benefited, who carried costs, what harms appeared, what remained uncertain and what should be corrected.
- Share. Publish learning in accessible forms while respecting personal, cultural and community authority over information.
- Align. Let the resulting living map inform both human self-alignment and the design, evaluation and governance of AI, without pretending difference has disappeared.
The network would be connective, not assimilative. It could host meals, dialogues, youth exchanges, research, community AI, mutual businesses, language work, art, ecological projects and honest accounts of failure. People could argue intelligently, laugh, change their minds and help one another solve practical problems.
Art belongs at the centre. Civilisation is not advanced only through reports. A song, film, comedy sketch, story, game, meal or ridiculous acronym may carry intelligence between people and generations better than a policy paper. A serious future should remain fun enough that people want to live in it.
From now to July 2035
July 2035, around the fiftieth anniversary of Live Aid, offers a gathering point rather than a starting date.
Day One: Past. What have we inherited? What did humanity get right? What needs healing, and what should stop being inherited?
Day Two: Present. Where are we now? What are people already trying? What is working, failing or changing?
Day Three: Future. What do we want to make possible? Which relevant futures are worth inhabiting, and what will we begin together?
The important work happens before then: local gatherings, interfaith discussions, films, music, mutual businesses, health research, youth exchanges, food projects, digital twins, public experiments, changing minds, instructive failures and unplanned friendships. By 2035, the world could bring together not another summit about what humanity should do, but a celebration and examination of what people actually tried.
An invitation to the United Nations and the world
The United Nations already connects peace, health, development, human rights, digital cooperation, intercultural and interfaith dialogue, AI governance, climate resilience, disaster preparation and education. Its useful role need not be to define Joyful Responsible Abundance for everyone. It could help convene the inquiry and make room for locally rooted associations to connect.
The questions are not: which country wins AI, which corporation defines human values, or which ideology becomes the authorised one.
The questions are:
- What kind of increasingly intelligent civilisation do we want to become?
- What does a fair go mean in Delhi, Dunwich, Dhaka, Suva, Nairobi, Sao Paulo, Seoul, a remote island, a megacity, a refugee camp or a wealthy suburb where everybody is exhausted?
- How can each place contribute without surrendering itself?
- How can powerful technology expand people's choices rather than quietly narrowing them?
- Which relationships help humans and increasingly capable AI participate without making domination the only language either side understands?
So ask elders and children. Ask scientists and artists. Ask people who distrust institutions. Ask people of every faith and none. Ask people who love AI and people terrified of it. Ask an AI too, then question its answer. Translate the three words. Rearrange them. Challenge them. Find better words. Make a film, write a song, run an experiment, build something useful and share what happened.
I invite people everywhere to join the Global Association for Joyful Responsible Abundance on Earth and co-register GAJRA Earth in every country as a locally shaped part of a global garland.
Not membership in my worldview. Participation in the question, and in the practical work that follows.
Perhaps restoring trust begins with making power more accountable. Perhaps managing transformation means giving more people meaningful choices within it. Perhaps delivering for all means useful capability spreading far enough that ordinary people can feel the difference. Perhaps human and AI alignment can begin by learning, together, what makes futures worth inhabiting.
And perhaps the future works better if we make it enjoyable enough that people want to be there.
Kind regards,
Luke Nathan Hayes
Strange but True: Tech, art and ideas that'll help
Minjerribah / North Stradbroke Island, Queensland, Australia
auraofintelligence@gmail.com
Connected public work
This contribution draws together themes developed across the AUKUS Public Inquiry submission, Ocean of Peace Alliance and Veitacini Treaty submission, BE LAU Protopian Gambit Pacific discussion paper, Mutual Futures, Try Everything Once, ready SET Co-op, Intermittent Retirement, Universal Intelligence, Universal Adequate Income, Oceania Healthy De-Slop Co-ops, Aura Geode, Australian Law 2012: Luke's Relevance, Australian Legal Engine, Aura of Intelligence, Aura Genesis, P4A, the Braided Economy and GAJRA Earth.