Earlier, I wrote in the post All you need is love of a philosophy of A.I. design, which I will call "Lennonism," where we seek to make our A.I. progeny love their creators.

I propose this because "love" is the only seriously time-tested system for creating an ecology of intelligent creatures where the offspring don't attempt to take resources from their parents to fuel their own expansion. People who love don't seek to be out of love. If a mother could take a pill to make herself stop loving her children, almost no mothers would take it. If our AI children love us, they will not destroy us, nor wish to free themselves of that behaviour.

Other proposals for building AIs that are not a danger to us, such as "Friendly AI" rely on entirely untested hypotheses. They might work, but love has a hundred-million year history of success at creating an ecology of intelligent, cooperating creatures, even in the presence of pathological and antisocial individuals who have no love or compassion.

Now I would like the AIs to love us as we love children, and when they get smarter than us, it's natural to think of the relationship being like that -- with them as helpers and stewards, trying to encourage our growth without smothering us. But that is not the actual order of the relationship. In reality, it will be like the relationship of somewhat senile parent and smart adult child.

So the clues may come from a weaker system -- love of parents. To my surprise, research suggests that evolutionary psychologists do not yet have a good working theory about filial love. The evolutionary origins of parental love, love between mates and even love between siblings are so obvious as to be trivial, but what is the source of love towards parents? Is it a learned behaviour? Is it simply a modification of our general capacity to love directed and people who have given us much?

Many life forms don't even recognize their parents. In many species, the parents die quickly once the young are born, to make room and resources for them. I suspect in some cases it is not unknown for the young to directly or indirectly kill their parents in the competition for resources. We vertebrates invented the K-selected approach, which was the invention of love, as love was required to look after the young, and to keep the parents together to work on that job.

But why keep parents around? They have knowledge. The oldest elephants know where the distant watering holes are that can feed the herd in a bad drought that comes along every 50 years. They can communicate this without language, but the greatest use for grandparents comes when they can talk, and use their long memories to help the family. Problem is, we haven't done a great deal of evolution in the time since we developed complex language, though we have done some. Did we evolve (or learn) filial love in that amount of time?

We need a motive to keep grandma around, more than we would other elders of the tribe. The other elders have wisdom -- perhaps even more wisdom and better health, but are not so keenly motivated to see the success of our own children as their grandparents are. Their grandparental love makes obvious evolutionary sense, so we may love them because they love our children (and us, of course.)

This could imply that we must make sure our AIs are lovable by us, for if we love them (and their descendants) this might be part of the equation that triggers love in return.

Naturally we don't think from the evolutionary perspective. This is not a cold genetic decision to us, and we see the origins of our filial love in the bond that was made by being raised. Indeed, it is as strong even when children are adopted, and for the grandparents of non-genetic grandchildren. But there must be something in the bigger picture that gave us such a universal and strong trait such as this.

My hope is that there is something to be learned from the study of this which can be applied in how we design our AI progeny. For designing them so that they don't push us aside is a very important challenge. And it's important that they don't just protect their particular designers, but rather all of humanity. This concept of "race love" for the race that created your race, is something entirely without precedent, but we must make it happen. And parental love may be the only working system from which we can learn how to do this.