While ML generates much economic value, many of us have problematic relationships with social media and other ML-powered applications. One reason is that ML often optimizes for what we want in the moment, which is easy to quantify but at odds with what is known scientifically about human flourishing. Thus, through its impoverished models of us, ML currently falls far short of its exciting potential, which is for it to help us to reach ours. While there is no consensus on defining human flourishing, from diverse perspectives across psychology, philosophy, and spiritual traditions, love is understood to be one of its primary catalysts. Motivated by this view, this paper explores whether there is a useful conception of love fitting for machines to embody, as historically it has been generative to explore whether a nebulous concept, such as life or intelligence, can be thoughtfully abstracted and reimagined, as in the fields of machine intelligence or artificial life. This paper forwards a candidate conception of machine love, inspired in particular by work in positive psychology and psychotherapy: to provide unconditional support enabling humans to autonomously pursue their own growth and development. Through proof of concept experiments, this paper aims to highlight the need for richer models of human flourishing in ML, provide an example framework through which positive psychology can be combined with ML to realize a rough conception of machine love, and demonstrate that current language models begin to enable embodying qualitative humanistic principles. The conclusion is that though at present ML may often serve to addict, distract, or divide us, an alternative path may be opening up: We may align ML to support our growth, through it helping us to align ourselves towards our highest aspirations.

翻译：尽管机器学习（ML）产生了巨大的经济价值，但我们中的许多人与社交媒体及其他基于ML的应用程序之间存在着问题重重的关系。原因之一在于，ML通常优化的是我们当下想要的东西——这虽易于量化，却与科学所知的关于人类繁荣的规律相悖。因此，由于对人类采用贫乏的模型，ML当前远未达到其激动人心的潜力——即帮助我们实现自身的潜力。尽管关于如何定义人类繁荣尚未达成共识，但在心理学、哲学和精神传统等多元视角中，爱被视为其主要催化剂之一。受此观点启发，本文探讨是否存在一种适用于机器去体现的有用的爱的概念。历史上，探索一个模糊概念（如生命或智能）能否被深思熟虑地抽象并重新构想（如在机器智能或人工生命领域）一直是富有成效的。本文提出了一种关于机器之爱的候选概念，尤其受积极心理学和心理治疗的启发：提供无条件的支持，使人类能够自主追求自身的成长与发展。通过概念验证实验，本文旨在强调ML中需要更丰富的人类繁荣模型，提供一个示例框架，通过该框架可将积极心理学与ML结合以实现机器之爱的粗略概念，并证明当前语言模型已开始能够体现定性的人文主义原则。结论是：尽管当下ML常常使人上瘾、分心或分裂，但一条替代路径可能正在开启——我们可以使ML与支持我们成长的目标对齐，通过它帮助我们调整自身，朝向最高的志向。