Choosing Nine Goals for All Domains

The nine goals are fixed for this site, but users should consider them helpful rather than definitive. The method for arriving at this list is likely to outlast their headings and descriptions for two reasons:

1. The number is not exhaustive.

   Avoiding, beginning, exploring, sustaining, mastering, and inspiring define six levels of complexity. Since avoiding is always the same and inspiring never the same, we excluded them in our definitions, but they do matter in thinking about the number of patterns that can be achieved with a certain number of levels of complexity. In our case, six levels of nine distinct goals creates 10 million patterns. That’s more than enough enough for practical human purposes, but is likely to be a molecule in an ocean of the uses of Artificial Intelligence.

2. The science behind them is new and rapidly changing.

   We based our choices of the nine goals on individual neurological development rather than on historical and artificial intelligence development. We decided that the best way to ensure that our goals covered all domains of work and life was to base them on separate brain systems that develop late in life. Work on distinguishing brain functions is less than 150 years old and has undergone enormous improvements since the beginning of fMRI studies in the last 4 decades (functional MRI is a technique for observing which parts of the brain are active during specific tasks). In addition, though distinct, the nine systems both overlap and are flexible. One system can partially take over functions of other systems when disturbed. It seems likely but not certain that when events thwart one goal, achieving high levels of another might compensate.