"Ambitious" is like "very much having an ambit". That is, having a large area where one goes. "Ambit" is from "ambi", "am" (around) + "bi" (both); "around on both sides", or conceptually "all around in all areas". Appears in ambulate, ambulance, ambiguous, ambience, amphitheater, amphibian, ambassador. The "am" is cognate with Germanic "um-" as in "umwelt", around-world.

An ambitious goal is one that calls on the goal-pursuer to go around a lot, to visit and touch a lot of the cosmos. Ways a goal can be ambitious:

• It is straightforwardly about a lot of the cosmos.
  • For example, "maximize diamond" is ambitious because it specifically says to arrange as much matter, from any and all places in the world, into diamonds.
  • As another class of examples, any universal-flavored goal will tend to be ambitious. E.g. "There should be no suffering--anywhere, at any time, in any reality, for anyone." is a universal goal. Or "I should be the most praised, of anyone anywhere forever.".
• It is very difficult, even if not specifically about much of the cosmos.
  • For example, "prove the Reimann Hypothesis" (or rather, some other much more difficult problem) would be an ambitious goal.
  • It doesn't say anything about what to do with the rocks on Proxima Centauri b.
  • But it does ask for a whole lot of compute, which requires matter and energy; it does ask that the goal-pursuer not be destroyed (and so asks that potential destroyers be preemptively destroyed); and depending on how it's specified, it might ask for acausal bargaining with agents in other causal regions.
• By telotecting an ambitious goal.
  • For example, humans might have a goal like "build a civilization that enables humanity to flourish and discover itself and realize its full potential". By itself, that's not directly about the whole cosmos; you could probably acheive the initial stage of such a civilization, given just Earth's resources. But it says to build a thing, and that thing might itself be a pursuer of an ambitious-goal.
  • As a general class of examples, many reflective goals will in a sense be ambitious, in that they'll demand that the mind be a certain way, and being that certain way implies creating and pursuing ambitious goals.
    • E.g. some version of a goal like "be deeply and strongly kind" might be given as a criterion for some structure of an agent, something about the mechanism or process, rather than a description of which possible full-world-states are better or worse.
    • This "aboutness", taken straightforwardly, points just at some computations in some little agent's head. You can make yourself a kind person, without doing anything with the dust on Proxima Centauri b.
    • But as a consequence of acheiving the goal of reshaping yourself so that your mind's internals satisfy the mechanistic criterion of "be deeply and strongly kind", in combination with other dynamics in your mind, you might then become extremely ambitious. Thus "just be kind" is indirectly, cryptically, a very ambitious goal.

Having an ambitious goal isn't the same as being an unboundedly creative goal-pursuer, or engaging in channel-general goal pursuit. Imagine for example that a cult gains supremacy over humanity, and then reshapes humanity to focus on the sole goal of building a 1000-meter glass tower on every planet in the lightcone. That cultic civilization invents things, but only the minimal set of things needed to acheive that goal in a direct, plodding way (many spaceships with food and robots); and then it stops, and strictly regulates all creative thinking, even to the point of killing anyone who thinks too much or too creatively.