GAJRA Earth
Join us in Global Association for
Joyful Responsible Abundanceon Earth
We go beyond the safe and the small.
A meeting of minds about AI alignment, and about the people doing the aligning. Two kinds of it, held together. AI alignment: whether the systems being built point anywhere worth arriving. Self alignment: whether the way a person lives and works actually points where they say it does.
Nobody knows the destination, so there is no plan for one here. Joyful, responsible, abundance is the frame for that conversation rather than the conclusion of it, worked out in public and under version control. If you build intelligent systems, work beside them, or are one, come and help define the three words Joyful, responsible, abundance, and what they could mean as a trinity.
Real footage: the aurora from the International Space Station, ending over the lights of Perth. Courtesy NASA.
ga·jra noun
A garland of jasmine and marigold, strung one flower at a time and worn at ceremonies across South Asia. No single flower is the garland. The thread is what makes them one thing.
At planetary scale, Earth wears one too. The aurora is a garland the Sun strings around the planet's crown. The name is the thesis: the same pattern, from a flower in someone's hair to the light over the poles. The garland, at every scale.
A harbour, not a headquarters.
The safe and the small is where you start from, and what you come back to. Going beyond it is the point of having it.
The frontier is not one place and it is not somebody else's. Everyone's edge sits wherever the known runs out for them: a committee table, a first sentence in a new language, a phone call put off for a year. The map exists afterwards because somebody went.
Nobody here is offering permission or issuing demands, since neither was anyone's to give. Nor is anything here thrown at the old systems: fill in every form, overcomply until they have to change shape. What a harbour is for is the coming back. Land, get paid, teach what you found, be looked after while you mend, and somebody buys you a drink for having gone at all. Whoever goes furthest ends up answerable for what they found, which is the difference between a steward and a settler.
No utopia on offer. A utopia is a destination, and whoever names one would like you to stop asking questions. Better than yesterday, then better again, with somewhere to rest between goes. The songs got there first: the album is called A Protopian Gambit, and a gambit is a move made early, on purpose, before anyone knows how the game ends.
What type of world do you wish for?
That is the question. The signatures file is where working answers go.