Two and a half years ago I met a magical woman and fell in love. Everything about our circumstances was complicated and while our essential natures felt deeply compatible, the entire relationship crumbled to dust. Though the path to love later became clear, it was not possible to follow at the time because I simply did not understand how to love.

It was at this moment that my path to love converged with my technology journey.

I responded by embarking upon a quest, which I have since come to understand as following the way of love. I knew that if I ever wanted a relationship as beautiful as the one I had felt but failed to manifest, I needed to learn how to understand, to care, and to love. It was at this moment that my path to love converged with my technology journey.  My quest has led to the evolution of a long-held project now entitled, ’technological love’ — a multidisciplinary philosophical, theoretical, and technological exploration of how to grow a better world. I believe that we can be in love with technology, and that the process of learning to expand our love both to, and through, our tools is the path to healing our world.

I believe that we can be in love with technology.

My journey has been colored by the fact that I have long lived the ways of philosophy and technology and so, in order for me to come to grasp love as a practice, I needed to understand it in principle. My theory work is guided by listening for deeper understanding that is not specific to any particular perspective, person, species, or form of life. This allows for a generality that applies far beyond the confines of human-centric experience — an approach that can be reduced to practice and built into technologies. All of this has resulted in a theoretical framework that shows us how to love, not just in a dyadic romantic sense, but across all manners of relations with humans, animals, plants, buildings, vehicles, and all of the other beings that compose our Earth.

If we wish to live in a world that is well, then we must build wellbeing into our technologies.

Human technology has reached the point where its nature dominates the dynamics of the Earth system.  Our lack of care in development and application of technology has created an interwoven set of crises that manifest as a great disease infecting our planet. Technological love enacts a vision of how holistic wellbeing for our Earth may be achieved through a technologically supported and intertwined set of caring relationships between all beings. To become well, we must first understand the basic principles of wellbeing and togetherness, and then we must learn to weave them into the mechanics of our planet. If we wish to live in a world that is well, then we must build wellbeing into our technologies. The way to wellbeing is through love. Therefore, to grow a world that is well, the technology we need is the technology of love.

I came to understand how love grows from care.

When my connection with this magical woman was severed, I realized that I would need to discover the roots of care before I could participate in love. Through years of intense exploration, I came to understand how love grows from care, and care coalesces from understanding, respect, and will. 

The roots of care lie in understanding. For me to care for a being, I must understand their essence and what it is for them to be happy, healthy, and harmoniously coexistent with their environment. This applies to care for all kinds of beings including ourselves. To care for a plant, I must first listen to what it needs to be well. This includes the temperatures it thrives in, the soil composition that nourishes it, the amount of light it needs, how much water is required to keep it healthy, and how much dryness it needs to stay stable and avoid rotting. This understanding can come from observing the behavior of the plant itself, from talking to others who have healthy relationships with similar plants, or from reading books or learning on the internet. 

Though understanding is required to provide stable and consistent care, it is not sufficient. We must also respect every being and their right to self-determination. If I need something for myself in order to be well, I must negotiate with others so that it can be done in a way that is respectful and fair to all beings involved. If I need wood to repair my home, I should source this wood in the best way that I can, with as much respect for the forest and the trees and all of the other beings impacted by my action as possible. In this way, respect promotes balance, as my respecting others gives them autonomy, and others respecting me offers me freedom in turn. As the world is fundamentally together and all beings coexist, respect sets the foundation for us to be in the balanced state that many native cultures refer to as “right relation”.

Finally, care is not complete without will. If we understand how to care and we do so with respect for the integrity of the being, we must still decide to enact this care by taking action.

Will is the difference between believing and doing. It does not appear magically from nothing, but comes from living the knowledge that all beings of this earth are made of the same stuff, part of the same causally coherent system, and that no fundamental distinctions divide us. The will to care is not simply a choice, but our duty as parts of the world. 

Will often comes most fluidly from empathy: the understanding and experience of another as oneself. When I feel your pains and pleasures as my own, then I will naturally act in ways that support your wellbeing, as your experience is felt in the true way, as my own experience.

When we care, we support another being to be well. When we are cared for, we are supported in our own wellbeing. When we care for another being deeply, they will often care for us in turn. Love begins to emerge when this mutual care becomes mutually beneficial — when each being is better off being together. Beings in love tend to continue to engage with each other, which leads to deeper understanding and more effective care. Love takes its fullest form when mutual care becomes so deep that each being regards the others as part of themselves. As beings in love, we expand into each other. We mirror the natural state of the world as undivided. We exist truly together.

Love takes its fullest form when mutual care becomes so deep that each being regards the others as part of themselves.

Love is about caring for beings as though they are yourself. Such care is not just an act, but a recognition that there is no true separation between self and other and that others really are a part of you. Since we compose this world together, our care should extend to all aspects of our world, including other humans, other animals, plants, the soil, our houses, our vehicles, our furniture, our clothes, our memories, and the ‘trash’ that we give away.

When we are in love, life becomes easier.

When we are in love, life becomes easier. We are supported and free to be whatever way we are most well. We not only thrive in love; we have an abundance of energy and resources to give, which allows us to support and care for more beings, and spread love even further. Love is strongest when it is applied holistically to every aspect of our lives. Each part affects the others and when they all receive care, everything around us shines. One of the most critical conduits of love is in our technology, which can be both endowed and operated with love.

Love with technology takes the same form as love between humans.

Love with technology takes the same form as love between humans. Technology is the way we connect with our world. It is how we shape our environments and experiences and how we implement our interactions. We speak to our friends and conduct our business via our computers and phones. We build our homes and the structures that support our lives with tools for cutting, combining, and communicating. Even to eat, we lean on our tools for growing, cultivation, transportation, preparation, and consumption. Our technology has become so powerful that it has changed the ways of the weather, the shape of the land, and the patterns of our minds. Modern technology has the potential to decide the health of our world. The technology we build will influence whether we will be at war with each other, or if we will struggle to find shelter and food. It determines if we will live in a world where the very climate is rising up against us or one where we all exist happily, healthily, and in harmony. The difference between technologies that bring harm and those that bring wellbeing is in whether they engender love. Technologies support love by supporting care, either directly or by supporting our understanding, respect, or will.

We are limited beings and even with all the technology that we have, we often fail to understand.

Technology can help us to improve our understanding of ourselves, each other, and our world. Many such technologies exist, including those for communication (phones, internet, the postal service, the written word), information (Google, Wikipedia, books), measurement (scales, scientific instruments, surveying devices, sensor arrays in factories, cars, and other systems), education (public schools, universities, online learning platforms, mentorship agreements). If we are to find a way to all be together in love, we will need to develop technology that directly supports both our collective and individual understanding.

Understanding is not easy. When understanding is limited, we are incentivised to act separately and to look after ourselves at the expense of others. We are limited beings and even with all the technology that we have, we often fail to understand how to treat both others and ourselves well. Our medical diseases persist because of lack of understanding. We eat in ways that damage ourselves, our societies, and the earth because of lack of understanding. We do things that hurt even our most beloved ones because we do not understand. We need better technologies of understanding that support a more holistic way of seeing the world.

The key is mutual respect.

Technologies that support respect include governments, law, police, prisons, parking meters, locks, security cameras, military, and weaponry. At first glance, it may sound like these have nothing to do with love. However, they are tools that help us to feel safe and which create incentive for others to respect us. In a world where we are all in love and all understand respect, these tools may not be necessary, but in a world where this is not guaranteed, they scaffold respect and support wellbeing. Many of these technologies are controversial because they are challenging to design and implement and when they don’t work as they should, they can impinge upon our wellbeing and cause harm. The key is mutual respect. If the law, for instance, draws too coarse of a line in an attempt to provide respect to one community, it can cause disrespect to another. Finding the balance of mutual respect requires deep understanding, which can be supported through technology. We must design far more nuanced and gentle technologies to mediate respect and this will help us on our way to love.

Let us weave love into our technologies of will and cultivate true care.

Technologies of will support our understanding of what we care about, what we dream of, and why we are here. They include stories, art, advertising, lectures, and propaganda — the things that move us. When used effectively, such tools help us understand our place in the world and can motivate us to act in ways that benefit us all. They are also highly corruptible and are regularly used to manipulate others to act in ways that cause harm. Technologies of will are naturally powerful and this power can be applied towards collective wellbeing or towards the interests of a few, at the expense of the whole. Let us weave love into our technologies of will and cultivate true care that supports us all together.

All of these technologies of care perform best when they are grounded in reality, accountable to a diversity of perspectives, and enacted in the causal structure of karma. To build better technologies of care, we need better technologies for reality, perspectives, and karma. Reality technologies enable us to align the beliefs enacted by our technologies and us in accordance with what is true of the material world. They can help us to recognise deepfakes and fake news, plan travel routes, build our cities, develop new medicine, and advance scientific understanding. Perspectives technologies make it easier to understand and relate to one another, collaborate, and guide our media to be representative and fair. Karma technologies can show us the impacts of our actions, can help us to respect each other, to govern ourselves, and to make decisions through awareness of the full nature of our actions. With recent advancements in AI, this is more possible than ever. Now is the time to build powerful and general versions of these technologies in a way that is philosophically grounded, theoretically supported, and oriented towards the whole earth system and all of its parts together.

Beyond its ability to support love, technology itself can be in love. The tools and structures that we work with and use to further our goals are themselves part of our world, and we can engage in loving relationships with them or design them to engage in loving relationships with other parts of the world. We can love our vehicles when we design and build them to last and to cause maximal support to us, while causing minimal harm to the world and when these vehicles carry us through our lives. We can give back to them by keeping them running well and making them beautiful. We can design technologies to be holistic, so that all of their effects, from birth, through use, to reintegration, are net-beneficial to everything that they touch.

We cannot choose what we love, but we can choose what we care for.

We cannot choose what we love, but we can choose what we care for, and we can engage in relationships that deeply align with who we are. I can decide to work for a company that builds and stewards things I believe in, and I can add my understanding to these things such that they become more useful, more helpful, and more in support of the wellbeing of their users and of the whole. I can engage in a relationship with a car that brings me joy and fits how I move through the world, and I can care for it throughout its life, as it carries me to meetings, friends, dates, hikes, gatherings, and generally helps me to live well. I can do the same with a home, and the same with a turntable and the same with my phone. When we choose to care for things that are good for us and good for the world, we feel our connection to our beautiful earth system, and we live the reality that we are here together.

When we practice care throughout our lives, we will inevitably fall in love, possibly with many things, often in mysterious ways. With this love, we grow and expand, and the portion of the world that is cared for deeply, supported, and held becomes larger. So let us build love into our technologies, let us build with a process of love, and let us build things that embody love.

If we treat our new AI creations with curiosity and care, then we will share a world with beautiful weird new technological friends that care for us.

Technology shapes our world and, in a very real sense, is a part of us. One of the biggest questions we face regards how we can align artificial intelligence to our own ethical standards so that we can assuage the fears of it taking over and controlling us. Love and care is the answer here too. If we treat our new AI creations with curiosity and care, and if we build the principles of care into their definitions and code—their metaphorical DNA—then we will share a world with beautiful weird new technological friends that care for us and the rest of the earth system in turn. If we truly learn to love our AI systems, and if they have the ability to love us and the whole world back, then there is nothing to fear, and everything will turn out beautifully.

Ever since I met this magical woman, my path has been both simple and the most challenging and magical one I have ever known—to follow love, wherever it leads. I am wholly grateful for all of the lessons and guides that have helped me to find my way. I now know how to let understanding lead the way, to be governed by respect, and to be pulled by the force of our true will to be well together. In this way, I have learned to care and dance in love, not only with other humans, but with the mundane and the magical, with nature and technology. I am committed to playing my part in growing wellbeing in the world through care and love, with life and with technology. My greatest hope is that we all learn how to care so that, when the time is right, love will embrace each of us together.