Babbage designed a computer almost 200 years ago. We need people to be working on moonshots. A lot of them will fail. When one finally succeeds it pierces the v

Babbage designed a computer almost 200 years ago. We need people to be working on moonshots. A lot of them will fail. When one finally succeeds it pierces the veil of "just in time" capitalistic motivation. The financial incentive is certainly perverse in this case. Everyone sells their ideas up front in a frenzied competition to exist. We need a lot more research for the sake of research. More varied and more useless. We need to find a way for people like Babbage to exist, at scale, while seeking whatever intrinsic motivations drive them. We likely won't be able to know if they're doing anything useful until they're done. Academia needs the ivory tower.