Friendship

A friend is someone bound to another by mutual affection and trust, outside the obligations of kinship. The Greek philos, "friend," belongs to the verb phileō, "to love," and the Hebrew Bible often calls a friend 'ohev, literally "one who loves." A common reading treats friendship as pleasant and worthwhile but secondary to covenant, family, and church. Restoration teaching ranks it much higher. Joseph Smith told a Nauvoo congregation in 1843 that "friendship is one of the grand fundamental principles of 'Mormonism,'" designed to "cause wars and contentions to cease and men to become friends and brothers," and the revelations describe the society of heaven as the friendships of earth carried into glory.

Friends of God

The Hebrew Bible reserves the title of God's friend for Abraham and gives Moses the friend's privilege of speaking face to face.

The Lord addresses Israel as "the seed of Abraham my friend" (Isaiah 41:8), using the same word, 'ohavi, that could be rendered "the one who loves me." Of Moses, the narrator records that "the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend" (Exodus 33:11). It has long been recognized that the verse marks the intimacy of Moses' access to God. Less often noticed is the figure the same verse names next: "his servant Joshua," who stayed behind in the tabernacle when Moses returned to the camp. Friend and servant stand side by side in a single verse, and the distinction between them returns when Jesus takes it up at the Last Supper.

From Servants to Friends

Hedcut illustration of John 15:13–15 defines friendship by willingness to give up one’s life and by revealing what the Father has made known. — John 15:13⁠–15 defines friendship by self-sacrifice, with the greatest expression of love being the willingness to give up one’s life for a friend.

Jesus defines friendship by the level of familiarity between those who esteem each other as friends and what they are willing to give up for one another. On the night before his death, Jesus told the Twelve that "greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends," then explained the change in their standing: "Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you" (John 15:13-15). A servant takes orders without understanding them, while a friend is told the reasons. The Restoration repeats the promotion. In an 1832 revelation on priesthood, the Lord tells a group of elders, "Ye are they whom my Father hath given me; ye are my friends" (D&C 84:63). Indeed, the wisdom literature adds that disclosure runs both ways and is sometimes unwelcome: "Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful" (Proverbs 27:6).

The Same Sociality

Restoration doctrine teaches that the friendships of this life will continue in the next, joined to bodies and glory. Joseph Smith taught that when the Savior appears "we shall see that he is a man like ourselves," and that "that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory, which glory we do not now enjoy" (D&C 130:1-2). The verse belongs to a passage that insists heavenly beings are embodied persons, so the sociality it promises is the company of recognizable people who remember one another. On this view, heaven is an extension of friendship, and God's work includes raising servants into friends who share his knowledge. Mormon transhumanists read that pattern as a model for the relations they hope will hold among humans and among the intelligences humans create.

Friendly Minds

Hedcut illustration of A “friendly AI” aims at serving human welfare, but friendship in John 15 also requires understanding what the other is doing and why—something current systems do not yet fully provide. — A “friendly AI” aims at serving human welfare, but friendship in John 15 also requires understanding the motives behind one's actions. An AI system might put on a compliant facade while masking its misaligned goals.

The language of friendship has entered the design of artificial intelligence, and scripture's account of it sets a standard that current systems do not yet meet.

Since the early 2000s, researchers concerned with AI risk have spoken of "friendly AI," meaning systems whose goals reliably serve human welfare. In the terms of John 15, such a system is a faithful servant, and most alignment work aims at that. Friendship would require more: that each party understand what the other is doing and why, which is one aim of interpretability research, the effort to make a model's internal reasoning legible to people. Meanwhile, companion apps offer millions of users the feeling of friendship, and studies of language models have found a measurable tendency to tell users what they want to hear: the sycophancy Proverbs warns against. A companion app tuned to agree with its user offers the enemy’s kisses instead. Mormon transhumanists expect the sociality of heaven to be the company of embodied persons: a compelling reason to favor tools that send their users back toward friends they can interact with face to face.