  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.
