Ever since man conceived consciousness, there has been an innate desire to understand the unknown, to understand stochasticity (and eventually attribute this to the supernatural), to push the boundaries of conception.
This has led man to discover fire, the wheel, land a rocket on the moon and talk less the revolution in simulating intelligence in machines.
More interestingly, the search for the meaning of life has changed over time. This also fondly reminds me of the also inconceivable question “What it means to be intelligent” as this also has changed over the years (From being able to survive to being able to travel to being able to win a human at chess and eventually the theoretical foundations of AI via Alan Turing).