We can't ex ante compute what humans activity is critical for the forward preservation and growth of humanity. We can do targeted resource allocation for what

We can't ex ante compute what humans activity is critical for the forward preservation and growth of humanity. We can do targeted resource allocation for what we deem promising threads. We can identify simple failure states to avoid for known recurring issues (plant food now or starve next year.) But for the vast majority of areas a new venture is required by new people creating new things. Humans don't simply find, but generate meaning (some that coheres only in imagination, some that coheres to facts in the larger world, some that do both over time.) human meaning generation is a kind of random walk where each human is the write head for a path, the causal chain is too complex for any given discovery or "economically" useful thing to be easily predicted. Destroy art and maybe people will become too depressed to do anything, or will lack enough noise/inspiration in their thinking to have an insight. Many of these things are impossible to unwind.