What I Want

I don't really understand other people, so I don't know what they want out of life. I can speculate, though. Some people are focused on social interactions and want love (in a family), respect (in a community), or fame (in the media). Some people want to create beautiful things. Some people want money, and some people want power over other people. There are so many things that people want - some to achieve other ends, others as ends in themselves.

What I want most of all is power, but not power over other people. I want power over the material universe. I also want other people to have this kind of power - I don't want to keep it to myself. By this, I mean technological power and scientific understanding. A Saturn V rocket is one example of technological power, while Newtonian gravitation is an example of scientific understanding.

Such power is ethically neutral - neither inherently good nor inherently bad. However, it does inherently have an amplifying effect. A person with little power over the material universe has little effect, whether good or bad. A person with lots of power over the material universe can accomplish vast acts of greatness or vast evils. It goes without saying that although I want others to be powerful, I also want them to be good. It's easy to make someone more powerful, but hard to make them less evil. For example, I'm all for orbital spaceplanes, but I wouldn't want terrorists to get their hands on such devices. (Unlike some idiots, such as Bill Joy, I don't believe that the potential for misuse of technology should deter us from pursuing that technology. Caution, of course, is always prudent.)

Technological power is important because it gives people increased control over what will happen, both to themselves and to other things and people that they care about. Without power to affect the material universe, the things that you care about will be at the whim of someone else who does have such power, or worse, they'll be at the whim of nature. And the random events of nature are guaranteed to fuck you eventually. For example, antibiotics are powerful because they allow you to control whether your health is affected by bacterial infections. Without antibiotics, you might die of otherwise trivial stuff at any moment. Presidents Garfield and McKinley were assassinated by bullets, but they really died from the resulting infections. They had incredible power over other people, but not enough power over the material universe.

Scientific understanding is also important, even when it doesn't directly lead to technological advancement. (And who knows what will prove to be of value in the future.) Understanding how things work deepens our appreciation of good and beautiful things, and demystifies bad and vile things. Understanding can also help us to avoid bad things, even if we don't yet have the technology to deal with them after they happen. For example, we can't always cure cancer yet. But we do understand that smoking causes cancer. If you don't want to get cancer, then you shouldn't smoke. Of course, you haven't reduced your probability of getting cancer to zero, but at least you've exerted some control over your own fate.