To achieve our highest goals, we must be willing to abandon them

Someday computer scientists may build systems of astronomical complexity that provide profound benefit to humanity. However, the question today is how such feats will ultimately be achieved. As is common with technology, present limitations to modern approaches challenge our imagination to search for new paradigms and organizing principles. To examine the prerequisites to achieving our most ambitious objectives, this talk will contemplate the implications of recent counterintuitive results from experiments with evolutionary algorithms that suggest that search (which is a metaphor for innovation in general) is sometimes most effective when it is not explicitly seeking an objective. In particular, through several experiments in interactive evolution and with an algorithm called "novelty search," a picture of innovation is emerging in which objectives can help to guide us one stepping-stone away from our present understanding, yet ultimately become handcuffs that also blind us to essential orthogonal discoveries on the road to long-term innovation. While the implications of these insights for reaching our highest goals are in part sobering, the silver lining is that much can be gained by liberating ourselves from the temptation to frame all our projects in terms of what they ultimately aim to achieve. Instead, with evidence in hand, we can exploit the structure of the unknown by orienting ourselves towards discovery and away from the shackles of mandated outcomes.