On the importance of problems..................

 And most people are not satisfied merely to be confident in the survival of the species: they want to survive personally.  Also, like our early ancestors, they want to be free from physical danger and suffering.  In the future, as various causes of suffering and death such as disease and aging are successively addressed and eliminated, and human life spans increase, people will care about ever longer-term risks.

     In fact people will always want still more than that: they will want to make progress.  For, in addition to threats, there will always be problems in the benign sense of the word: errors, gaps, inconsistencies and inadequacies in our knowledge that we wish to solve—including, not least, moral knowledge: knowledge about what to want, what to strive for.  The human mind seeks explanations; and know that we know how to find them, we are not going to stop voluntarily.  Here is another misconception in the Garden of Eden myth: that the supposed unproblematic state would be a good state to be in.  Some theologians have denied this, and I agree with them: an unproblematic state is a state without creative thought.  Its other name is death.

-David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World