if you looked at great inventors say like Nobel, who amassed a fortune based on research and innovation - would you characterize him driven by greed ?
Why ? Is he any different from say Philo Farnsworth, or Louis Pasteur who never became wealthy ? Were they not driven by the same drive as Nobel ?
Is the drive to succeed different for these sets of people?
Truth is in the eye of the beholder
People are very bad at reasoning about motives of others. Faulty syllogism goes: Nobel invented dynamite. He became wealthy. Therefore, he must have been driven by desire for wealth. Same goes for Pasteur, of course. Maybe he was driven by desire for wealth, but couldn't succeed. My Bayesian senses tell me that Pasteur not being driven by greed is more likely, but I digress.
Leaving individuals aside, I believe that a system that doesn't reward greed is a better system. When a system rewards greed, anti-social behavior becomes prevalent, because it's easier to eat others' pie rather than making a bigger cake. In a system that doesn't reward greed, I believe that curious people will make the cake bigger for the sake of it.
I think -but i'm not certain!- that we have english words for those that "eat others' pie rather" vs "making a bigger cake". I think this is greed, and driven, respectively.
But as you say, we are extremely bad at ascertaining motives of others. So either we get lazy and reduce others to bring them to our level, or we are naturally suspicious and do so anyway.
I'd love to know more of a system that doesn't reward greed. We have laws in place to stop outright theft, but at least in countries like USA and Switzerland, laws do an extremely poor job at making certain politicians that come into politics dirt-poor, stay poor, while in office and even afterwards. That to me is exactly one aspect of the system that must change.
Compare, for example, the engineering-focused Roman empire with the idea-focused Greeks.
> governments recognized that technology was a strategic necessity, bam, within a century or two we went from playing with primitive batteries, to nuclear fission, the internet, and now AI.
Governments have recognized this since at least the time of Archimedes, though. A lot of well-known mathematicians worked on things like canons, mines, railroad networks etc. So I think something else is needed to explain the explosion you're talking about other than governments recognizing the strategic importance of technology. Probably computers (and networks of computers) together with the figuring out of quantum mechanics played major roles.
I think the part you're missing is all the brilliant ideas from brilliant people we missed out on over that 2,000+ year from people we never heard of due to science and art being funded only haphazardly by random wealthy patrons.
For almost all of history it was simply not an option to make a living simply by writing or researching. That's still the case in much of the world.
But once we started to systematize it properly, and governments recognized that technology was a strategic necessity, bam, within a century or two we went from playing with primitive batteries, to nuclear fission, the internet, and now AI.
Somebody was paying for Stallman to sit in an MIT lab and write a free compiler. Maybe we don't talk enough about who or why, or how to replicate that kind of success.