Goals
From Daniel Crabtree
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The naive assumption - goals are useless
It was back in primary school and intermediate that we were often taught frequently about the benefits of setting goals. The teachers talked about setting goals like learning to spell a few new words or other relatively simple tasks. I think the general belief is that you must set goals that are achievable and sometimes this is further constrained by only choosing goals which are achievable in a relatively short time period. At the time I never really realized the point of setting goals and I came to the conclusion that they were pointless and stupid.
The theory - absurd goals are useful
But, in late 1998 I came to the conclusion that goals were useful, but only if they were particularly grand or hard to achieve, the type of goals that people would say were unreasonable or impossible. By 2005 the type of goals I was using were not exclusively of the unreasonable or impossible type, but were typically still all quite difficult. This lead to a further revision in October of 2005. The theory of goals is now to divide goals into three classes: dreams, goals, and tasks.
The three classes - dreams, goals, and tasks
All three classes: things the person would like to be true, when true they must always increase happiness - whatever that means.
Dreams: often the person does not actively seek to achieve these, the defining difference is probably that the person will not be unhappy if they fail to have these come true. Note: these do not need to be possible.
Goals: the person actively seeks to achieve these (although not necessarily directly), they must be possible and potentially achievable. The person will be somewhat unhappy is these are not achieved, but generally achieving any one of these is to be greatly commended.
Tasks: the person actively seeks to achieve these (usually directly), they must be possible and easily achievable (relative to goals). The person will not be unhappy if they fail to have these come true in their lifetime as these are typically short term goals and are either achieved or given up on in relatively short time.
My personal (and current) instance of these three classes
Dreams
Meet / find / detect alien life
Transporter / Teleportation device
Holodeck (Star Trek) or equivalent through totally immersive virtual reality.
Ability to travel through to the future and then back to the present (being able to travel back in time would be a nice extra, but it's not essential).
Ability to download knowledge into my brain.
Ability to extend the capacity of my brain, and increase it's computation speed and power.
Goals
Intelligent agent: create an intelligent agent that lives on the internet which is equivalent in power to what any human could potentially do when sitting in front of your computer with you commanding them. Note: the agent need not be able to act in the world, control a robot, and do everything a human can do. Although I suspect that if this were truly achieved, that it would not be a great stretch to make agents that can act in the real world. Note: sometimes I refer to this as solving AI, that is not strictly correct.
Control and ownership of one or more giant companies + the ability to do practically anything within reason that requires money: effectively achieving this would probably entail being the richest person in the world as a side effect, and thus that is why I often give that as a synopsis of this goal.
Live for as long as possible while that is still desired: essentially this means living until there is either: A) no reason to live, B) quality of life is too low. The reason for this is that I am very keen to see what the future has in store for us, it will just be amazing to see what kinds of technological leaps we make in the next few hundred years, not to mention the next thousand, and the next million. It simply boggles the mind to think of what the world and universe may be like by then. Wow. A common synopsis I give for this is living forever, though strictly a very long time would be technically more correct.
Help people, advance the world, especially technology, science, and medicine: Once I have the ability to help myself sufficiently by means of reasonable achievement of the goal of having sufficient money to do practically anything within reason, I would like to start to help other people, I would probably start with my friends to some extent, before moving on to the rest of civilization. I am particularly interested in the research of new technologies, science, and medicine.
Tasks
PhD in Artificial Intelligence: complete my PhD on improving web search. Progress: proposal complete. research complete. I was supposed to start writing it up, back in December 2006. I started writing it recently and it should be finished very soon.
Play Piano: Currently learning: Mozart - Piano Sonata 11 - Rondo Alla Turca, Richard Clayderman - Ballade Pour Adeline, Beethoven - Piano Concerto 5 - Emperor - Rondo Allegro ma non troppo. Practising: Beethoven - Fur Elise
Speak Chinese: I would like to speak the language, I took the first half of the CHIN111 course at VUW, I am now trying to learn it on my own. I am currently building some tools to help me in that process. I will make these available once they are more complete.
Business: Expand my businesses to the point that they have an office and several staff members. I have started to pursue this again.
