about

i worked in finance, and for a few years in the 2000s did so from the himalayas while studying tibetan buddhism, a philosophical interest of mine since i was fourteen. in nepal and bhutan i happened upon alarming glacial recession, which reframed how i saw long-term risk and turned me toward sustainability. in 2012 the documentary digital dharma pushed me to preserve buddhist texts.

chance meetings with professors john ruggie in frankfurt and richard parker at the apple store in cambridge led me to start auditing classes at the harvard kennedy school, on top of years of sitting through every talk i could find on how institutions know what they know. the two worlds do not mix: markets score every verdict and keep no reasoning; institutions keep the reasoning and score nothing.

designing a program that paid people by the page to scan buddhist texts, and scanned millions of pages, taught me that an idea scales only when it is simple and anyone can take part. that was my test when i went looking for a way to create sustainability data in real time. i proposed the fix first in formal submissions to the u.s. securities and exchange commission, beginning in august 2021: a shared symbolic record that would let the financial system see its own impact.

the leap from sustainability to AI was short. that record was an answer to one question, how a system can see what it is doing to the world, scored by what happened next. then AI arrived: systems that will act on the world at a scale no market ever has, and that have no such record to learn from. i thought AI was a fancy parrot when i attended harvard sts’s “conference on AI & democracy” in 2023. two days later i woke up and saw it: the same disclosure data could ground AI in human judgment. sustainability was the first case. AI is the general one. the judgment kernel is where my s.e.c. proposal went once AI made the question urgent. since then i have been doing the research to build it, all of it on susarb.com/papers.

susarb is a delaware public benefit llc in cambridge, massachusetts. i build in the open, with receipts: every result is deposited with a doi, and when one of mine fails i say so in public and leave it in the record.

the name is sustainability plus arbitrage. the arbitrage is between what the world knows and what its record holds.

gregory caldwell beier