I had a job interview a week or so ago, and the interviewer had read my website. “So you prefer long term goals to long term plans. Can you explain your long term goals to me?”

It turned out I couldn't. Not clearly, not concisely. So it's time to redress that and make them more concrete. That's what this essay is all about.

Let's start at the beginning: What's important to me? Two things. Firstly, I want to be able to see what I've done. Secondly, I want to do a lot, or help others do a lot. In short, I want to have a big impact, and I want to leave a legacy that will outlive me (but there's an important catch, see below). This is why I'm interested in consulting, and especially public sector consulting. For all the jokes about consultants selling their souls and being useless, people hire them because they have problems they need to solve, and solving problems is making a difference.

Consulting can't be the end of the road though, because people only come to consultants when they have a problem they think they need help with. I want to be more proactive than that, and much more long term.

Specifically, there are three areas that I think need attention right now: Space exploitation, SENS and artificial sentience. It's important that whatever approach I take can be adapted to the problems that matter, those three might not in the future, but right now they're top of the list.

Why these three? I'll try and explain, but only briefly, so I might not convince you. To definitely convince you I'd need to make this essay much longer.

Space exploitation. We've done a lot of space exploration, but only a little bit of exploitation. In fact, our use of the vast space and resources beyond our atmosphere is pretty much limited to looking out, looking down, and as a communications relay. These are important and useful, but they're very limited. In fact, there's so much more we could do “up there” that it's hard to even know where to start. Let's take space-based solar power (SBSP) as a first example.

Solar power is nearly good enough down here on Earth, through the atmosphere, and it's much more efficient and powerful in space. The idea of SBSP dates back to the 60's, and is still being worked on today. A lot of problems need to be solved before it can be effective, including getting the generated electricity back to Earth. At the end of the day though, it is more environmentally friendly than even the greenest electricity. What's more, it is effectively unlimited. Nuclear power might be the next great thing, but fissile ore is as finite as fossilised dinosaur bones, and any “solution” to the energy crisis which uses nuclear power is ultimately as ineffective as a “solution” which relies on burning dinosaur bones more slowly. This is because burning any non-replenishable resource at any rate greater than zero will eventually leave us with the same problem as any other resource and any other burn rate. There are certainly other ways we can exploit space (e.g. zero-g manufacturing) but let's start with space-based solar electricity.

SENS abbreviates “strategies for engineered negligible senescence”, which is a euphemism for immortality. Because, personally, I hope that any legacy I leave can't outlive me! Jokes aside, consider the incredible waste of skill, talent and history that comes about because people die. Great artists, writers, engineers, scientists, parents, priests, architects, humanitarians and statesmen - they all die, and when that happens we all lose so much. Imagine if they didn't have to. Then the very idea that people could have a limited life span would seem as horrific and unfair and wasteful as it actually is. SENS and its benefits are an elephant of absolutely cosmic proportions, on a dining room table of quite ordinary proportions.

Yes, there are complex sociological issues here, and those also need to be considered, but let's take a step back and do some induction. It is impossible to deny the spectacular social and personal benefits that modern medicine and the consequent increased life expectancy have brought about. If we could extend the average life expectancy one more day we would. And having done that, if we could do it again, we would. And again, and again, and again and again and so forth, ad infinitum. The incremental benefit of adding just one more day knows no bounds. Medical research has focused on stopping us dying. It should focus on keeping us alive.

Artificial sentience is third-equal, and the last one (for now). The extent to which artificial intelligence has permeated day-to-day society is almost as staggering as it is invisible. The voice recognition programs that talk to you on the phone, the letter sorters that obviate the need for humans to drudge through all the mail (and are better at it than humans anyway), the computer programs that guide robots and help them understand the world they see through their video cameras - this is all AI that works so well it no longer seems intelligent. There are certainly plenty of AI problems left, but there is one problem so large that no one has seriously considered it since the 60's and 70's (when it didn't seem quite so big and scary). Artificial sentience. The creation of software-based independent, intentional (goal-forming) agents with full, general intelligence.

This is a hard problem, and it is a hard problem for lots of reasons. But the benefits of solving it are staggering, because once the mind is silicon it can take advantage of every technological advance that makes computers faster. And it can contribute to them. And silicon minds could probably be created or duplicated trivially. Do you see the positive feedback loop? Historically, society was short on available physical resources. The industrial revolution and all the benefits it has brought are a consequence of that restriction being relaxed. Now, society is short on intelligence, and AS would ease that restriction, just as railroads and trade eased physical resource restrictions in the past. In fact, just as the industrial revolution led to almost unimaginable changes in the world, the same would be true of any intelligence revolution. The benefits are literally unimaginable.

That's the what, and the why. But how? As I've proclaimed before, I try not to have a long term plan, only a long term goal - but here I do have plans, ideas at least. There are a range of obvious approaches that won't work. For example, I could become a researcher, but then I could do only a small part of one of them. Or I could start a business in the area, but then I could probably do only a small (albeit different slice) of one. I could even consult in all of them, but then other people would set the pace and direction. None of these is good enough. The general overall problem is that there is too much for one person to do. And therein lies the solution.

Leverage. For the above to be achieved, there needs to be more than one person heading in this direction. A lot more than one. One person can only do a small part of it, and to be honest I don't care if I personally don't do any of it, so long as it gets done.

So I look at the Methusaleh Mouse Prize, and the Ansari X Prizes, and the Rhodes Scholarships. And I look at all of the work that people are already doing in SENS and AS and space exploitation. And I see a solution. The solution is not to do the research or work directly myself. The solution is to inspire others to do it, and to let them reap the rewards. My goal is more specific now. I don't actually want to do any of the work myself, although I may end up working on some small part of it directly. Instead, I want to be spectacularly rich - and then I want to use that money to fund prizes and scholarships and research funds. That's the goal, that's where I'm going, and I am arrogant enough that I fully expect to get there.