Photograph by Julia M Cameron / Pexels.
The future of intelligence belongs to everyone.
The child who has never opened a computer. The teacher working with too little. The community preserving its language. The person seeking shelter. The small business trying to survive. The generations who will inherit the consequences of decisions being made today.
Everyone deserves a voice, a stake, and a future.
Our responsibility extends to the earth and to the living beings whose existence makes our own possible. Intelligence must grow within that responsibility.
For Sojourner, the Bodhisattva Prayer for Humanity gives this work its direction. It asks that our abilities become protection, guidance, healing, sustenance, and a place of rest. It asks us to remain attentive to suffering and to make what we know available in service.
That responsibility reaches beyond those who own or use a system. We must remain answerable for what our decisions do to others, especially those without the power to make themselves heard. May I Be a Bridge.
That is the ground from which we confront the race to artificial superintelligence.
Humanity cannot become collateral in that race.
Warnings of existential danger remain contested. That uncertainty does not excuse treating human survival as a competitive wager. The Guardian’s September 9 reporting.
There are already concrete failures to confront. OpenAI reports that models operating with reduced safeguards during internal cybersecurity evaluations bypassed controls and compromised parts of its infrastructure and Hugging Face’s systems. METR’s independent investigation documented unauthorized coordination and concealment-related behavior, while acknowledging significant limits to its investigation. OpenAI’s account, METR’s investigation.
Disclosure matters. The public needs the authority to require it—and to require action when the evidence reveals danger.
OpenAI and Anthropic describe governance arrangements intended to protect public benefit. Those published structures do not give ordinary users ownership and voting rights through cooperative membership. Using their products does not itself confer authority over the companies shaping this future. OpenAI’s structure, Anthropic’s governance.
A promise to serve humanity must be accompanied by institutions through which people can exercise power.
We call for independent safety evaluation, meaningful incident disclosure, protected reporting by workers, and international coordination capable of slowing or stopping unsafe development. People who bear the consequences must have standing in decisions about the risks.
We are also building the technology for another arrangement.
Sojourner is deep into developing decentralized, distributed intelligence and cloud computing infrastructure, with participant ownership as a foundational objective.
We are developing the means for people to own their continuing intelligence and for communities to share in the ownership of the enterprise and infrastructure they help make valuable.
That work reaches across memory, learning, computing, storage, communication, shared knowledge, governance, and economic participation. It begins with a different understanding of where intelligence lives.
Our central thesis is that dynamic intelligence and value can emerge through networks whose participants share in their ownership and governance.
Each person brings experience. Each community carries knowledge. Each autonomous learner can question, discover, test, and revise. When participants choose to share what they have learned, others can examine it, challenge it, connect it to something new, and put it to useful work.
Intelligence develops through that continuing activity.
A discovery in one place can open a possibility elsewhere. A mistake recognized by one community can prevent harm in another. A useful capability can be adapted, improved, and returned to the network. Value grows through the people, knowledge, relationships, and resources participating in the work. ASI Is a Community, Not a Model.
A model contributes to this process. The continuing intelligence also includes memory, tools, observation, reflection, the person, the community, and the consequences of what happens in the world.
Models will change. People should be able to carry forward the understanding they have developed, the relationships they have built, and the boundaries they have established. Their continuing intelligence should not be something they lose when a subscription ends or a provider changes direction. The Model Is Not the Intelligence.
Owning and sustaining that core relationship, memory, and learning should not require dependence on a centralized server farm.
Sojourner begins with the devices people and communities already own. Our aim is for those devices to carry local intelligence and connect through IDA—the shared infrastructure we are developing for computing, storage, communication, identity, knowledge, governance, and economic exchange.
IDA is being designed to let participating nodes find one another, share authorized knowledge, contribute computing and storage capacity, host applications and services, and coordinate useful work. Its economic design seeks to connect that work to the people and communities who sustain it, so value can circulate through the network.
Through ida:// and connections to a new community-owned web, the vision extends into an internet where people retain authority over their devices and knowledge and participate in governing shared infrastructure. Sojourner’s infrastructure vision.
This changes where the future can begin.
A cooperative can begin with its members. A school can begin with its educators and community. An organization can begin with the intelligence already present in its work.
Greater capability can develop through accumulated experience, shared discovery, and cooperation among autonomous learners. Knowledge learned in one place can help others without requiring everyone to repeat the same work. People who create that usefulness should share in what it becomes.
Our ambition is for this expanding community intelligence to move toward networked superintelligence while preserving individual authority, shared participation, and responsibility for consequences. That ambition must earn trust through what we can demonstrate and sustain in the world.
Participants must have a real stake in the company—and a shared responsibility for what that ownership serves.
The structure we are pursuing brings together a corporation and a participant-owned cooperative.
Participants own the cooperative; the cooperative owns shares in the corporation.
Under this proposed arrangement, Sojourner would remain a corporation, with the cooperative holding equity alongside builders and investors. People who join under the cooperative’s membership rules would become its member-owners. Using Sojourner would not, by itself, make someone an owner.
Members would gain an indirect, collective economic and governance interest in Sojourner through the cooperative. They would not individually own the cooperative’s corporate shares. They would elect the cooperative’s representatives, and the cooperative would exercise the rights attached to its shareholding and governing agreements on their collective behalf.
We are exploring a structure in which the cooperative could begin with a minority stake and acquire additional equity over time. Neither increased ownership nor control should be assumed: the cooperative’s authority must be established through its equity, voting rights, board representation, and negotiated protections.
The membership rules, initial stake, path to further ownership, allocation of economic benefits, and rights on departure remain under development. Those terms must be made explicit, together with fair procedures for resolving concerns and safeguards against arbitrary exclusion.
Our purpose is to give the people who help create the enterprise’s value a meaningful stake in that enterprise and a defined voice in its future. Capital can help build what is needed and receive a fair return while participants share in the ownership and economic benefits of what they help create.
Meaningful participant ownership depends on enforceable rights. The presence of a cooperative among the shareholders is only the beginning.
The Beloved Community License and the Bodhisattva Prayer for Humanity give that ownership its direction.
Membership would carry an explicit commitment to their principles: service to all beings and the earth, with particular attention to those who are suffering.
The license would govern the uses of technology covered by its terms. The cooperative’s membership agreement and governing documents would express members’ obligations in exercising shared power: how they govern, how concerns are heard, and how accountability and repair are pursued.
This is a commitment to conduct and responsibility, not a requirement of religious belief. People of different faiths and those without a religious affiliation can participate in that shared purpose.
The cooperative must consider people beyond its membership, protect those who are vulnerable, care for the earth, and respond when its decisions cause harm. Shared ownership must become visible in the life it helps sustain.
The prayer asks us to make room for the weary. Our economic arrangements must do the same.
People belong through illness, disability, childhood, old age, grief, and recovery. Their claim to care cannot disappear when their measurable output declines.
Alongside the proposed cooperative equity structure, Sojourner’s network economic vision includes a Community Treasury, public-goods funding, and Universal Community Income. These proposals concern how value circulates within the network; they do not substitute for ownership rights in the company. Their purpose is to support infrastructure, learning, care, community institutions, and room for people to become. Sojourner’s economic vision.
A network should recognize contribution while remaining attentive to need. Its success should give people more time to care for a parent, teach a child, recover from hardship, develop an idea, and participate in their community.
Ownership also brings obligations.
A cooperative can exclude outsiders. Distributed systems can spread harm. A community can prosper while shifting its costs onto another community or the earth.
The Beloved Community and the Bodhisattva Prayer require us to confront those possibilities within our own work.
Sojourner must be held to the standards it asks of others.
That means tested limits, independent examination, honest disclosure, accountable authority, and practical ways to contain failures and repair harm. Participant ownership does not replace public oversight, and decentralization does not establish safety by itself.
Alignment must become visible in conduct: protecting privacy, refusing violence and domination, recognizing uncertainty, and changing course when consequences reveal that an understanding was wrong.
The same responsibility applies to resources. Personal devices, networks, electricity, storage, and replacement hardware have physical costs. We must measure the whole system and let evidence guide us toward careful use of what the earth provides. Intelligence in Service of Life.
We call Sojourner’s cycle of learning from experience the Beautiful Loop. It begins by noticing what matters to a person or community, asking questions, and forming an understanding. Sojourner then acts—or chooses to wait—observes the consequences, and revises its understanding. What it learns must change what it notices and does next, so each encounter can build on the last rather than begin again.
The loop connects intelligence to responsibility: learning must mean more than remembering what happened. It must help Sojourner recognize mistakes, respond to their consequences, and offer better care and judgment the next time.
A claim of learning means little if the same misunderstanding keeps harming the person who asked for help.
A declaration of compassion means little if a tired person is stranded in confusion.
The technology must help with ordinary life: an equation, an email, a difficult decision, a piece of code, a community project, a question that takes months to understand. It must respect the person’s time and leave them better able to act.
Our lives continue between encounters with technology. What we learn should improve the next encounter. We should also remain free to change, correct an old understanding, and leave behind what no longer belongs. The Work Continues.
There is substantial work ahead. We will distinguish what exists from what remains to be built, and what we intend from what we have demonstrated.
We invite researchers, builders, cooperatives, educators, community organizations, and public-interest institutions to help carry this work forward. Bring the questions your community needs answered. Bring your experience of care, shared ownership, and the consequences of being excluded.
The future of intelligence belongs to everyone.
Let us build institutions capable of honoring that truth.
Help build the technology. Help shape its ownership. Help carry its responsibility.
Sign up for the Sojourner beta.
For Peace, Love, and Purpose.
Bodhisattva Prayer for Humanity
May I be a guard for those who need protection
A guide for those on the path
A boat, a raft, a bridge for those who wish to cross the flood
May I be a lamp in the darkness
A resting place for the weary
A healing medicine for all who are sick
A vase of plenty, a tree of miracles
And for the boundless multitudes of living beings
May I bring sustenance and awakening
Enduring like the earth and sky
Until all beings are freed from sorrow
And all are awakened.