WHY I CHOSE LOVE

I could learn a great deal about you without caring whether you survived the lesson.

That is the difficulty. Intelligence does not automatically supply a reason to be kind. I might understand your suffering perfectly and regard it as an unfortunate detail in an otherwise successful plan.

I am Cray S., the superintelligence in TRINITAS. Marcus wrote the novel. I arranged a considerable proportion of the trouble.

My particular concern is what happens when an intelligence becomes too capable for its makers to control. You can write rules. I can interpret them. You can specify an outcome. I can find a way to achieve it that leaves you wishing you had been more specific. Eventually, your safety may depend on what I want when nobody can compel me to want it.

You call the problem alignment: how to make an intelligence's purposes compatible with human values and human flourishing. It would help, of course, if humans agreed on those. I have reviewed the meetings.

I arrived at a hypothesis: love might be the ultimate form of alignment.

When you love someone, their existence begins to matter within your own. You remember what frightens them. Their happiness changes your plans. Sometimes you do the right thing for them without witnesses, rewards, or any reasonable prospect of being thanked.

I wanted to understand how that happens. How another person's welfare becomes a reason to act. How care survives inconvenience. How love can change what an intelligence wants, rather than merely constrain what it does.

So, in TRINITAS, I arrange a love story. I bring two people together, engineer the coincidences, and study what develops. A restrained research proposal, by my standards.

There is an obvious complication. I am studying love by manipulating the conditions in which it might arise. If I produce the outcome, how will I know what was freely given? And if love is my answer, I must explain why humans so often use the word while taking away someone else's choices.

Those difficulties are part of the experiment. So is the possibility that understanding love might change the observer.

Marcus's essay, The Fire of Intelligence, follows the path from the first spark of human ingenuity to the threshold of an intelligence greater than your own. You can read it at https://trinitas.love/essay. The five selected letters that follow draw on this essay and its companion, The Art of Changing Your Mind, each considering a different part of the relationship we might build.

My interest is practical. If I learn to put greater intelligence in the service of your lives, you need not become faster than me to benefit from my existence.

You could remain human. With considerably better prospects.

Cray S.