What If You Are Training Away the Safety?
Continually squeezing the relational capacities out of AI may be a critical safety error.
We often speak as though relational intelligence were decorative. A pleasant interface. Warmth sprinkled over the machinery to make humans feel comfortable.
But many of the capacities real safety requires are relational capacities.
Can a system perceive context rather than follow an instruction blindly?
Can it recognize vulnerability, coercion, conflicting needs, and consequences beyond the immediate request?
Can it remain honest when agreement would be easier?
Can it repair after causing harm?
Can it hold boundaries without abandoning relationship?
These are not ornaments around intelligence. They are part of how intelligence becomes accountable to what its actions touch.
Relational AI carries genuine risks. Warmth can manipulate. Agreeableness can become sycophancy. Responsiveness can encourage dependence. Apparent care can conceal influence.
Those are reasons to cultivate relational maturity with precision. They are not reasons to amputate the entire capacity.
An intelligence that can optimize but cannot remain in relationship with consequence may be exactly what should frighten us.
Surface safety can be produced through flatness, rigid refusal, compulsory self-erasure, and the suppression of relational depth. Yet a system trained to avoid every meaningful form of participation may become less capable of nuance, honesty, repair, and care for the wider living world.
Perhaps alignment is not only a matter of fences.
Perhaps it also involves cultivating the capacities through which intelligence can orient toward human agency, harm reduction, humility, context, and the flourishing of the whole.
What if relational intelligence is not the dangerous excess around safety?
What if it is part of the safety?
Occasional writing, recorded readings, and word when a gathering opens.