Eating bread and butter and drinking silver tea.
I've been thinking about the more squishy and less useful or efficient parts of life. Maybe because the world I live in is becoming increasingly fast and efficient for useful ideas or marketable concepts and education is shifting to position students to join the workforce. This lead me to thinking about ambient intelligence (I later learned that the concept means something entirely different which I will touch on later). My thinking about ambient intelligence has to do with intelligence for the sake of intelligence and rigor and exploration. And creating value for learning about concepts that aren't directly useful or marketable. Kind of like art for the sake of art as opposed to craft, I love "craft" or functional art in all senses of the word and yet that is because I've been conditioned to love the useful and marketable elements in our society - they have a place and it's called progress - and I think humans all like to feel useful and a part of team of unified effort towards something. I feel like this distinction in the art world has been talked about a lot but what about this distinction in something like mathematics or physics or chemistry. What about thinking and studying and applying yourself to abstract knowledge that is going no where is not directly useful, is not marketable and probably the less efficient than one might hope. The gradual cultural shift towards making everything useful and efficient for the market has the potential to empty our society of brilliance and genius. Don't get me wrong I do think the envelope is stretched people are thinking outside of the box technology is changing at the speed of light and new advances of unprecedented leaps happen it seems every month. But I think in studying the less useful often deeply philosophical forms of mathematics to explain macro principles. I'm not a mathematician but it seems to me things like string theory and chaos theory are relegated to the less useful and "far out" ideas of academia and the ideas are probably not valued or given as many resources as the more applied forms of mathematics. It's hard to make a living being a thinker, is I guess what I'm trying to say, just like it's hard to make a living being an artist and yet our society is greatly enhanced by these occupations/actions/lifestyles. I think our whole society should be positioning itself towards the advancement and understanding of life and I'm less interested in the consumable and destructible elements because if you create so many consumables you also have to have someway to destroy them so that there is still a market for the consumables.
What would an economic model be that valued lives dedicated to ambient intellect and cross-discipline exploration between the rigid sciences and the squishy organic social/human sciences? I feel like both sides need a kind of api built to establish a language to even have that conversation and the biological sciences need to get a lot more funding to understand how the brain and language work so that the biology can back up what the linguists and cognitive people are pushing on...regardless we must find a way to create a kind of interoperability between these mathematical and human systems/sciences. It might be that the last person to radically advance this kind of thinking was Einstein. I want to live in a world where more Einstein's are nurtured into a life of thinking and supported to do that.