Since ancient civilizations, the social class which produces intellectually only exists because there's a much bigger social class of people doing "nonintellectual" work.
In the case of ancient Athens, this lower class was composed of, mostly, slaves. Those would never be able to produce intellectual content or contribute to the advance of technology. Considering the proportion of slaves and citizens were near 1:1, imagine how much innovation was lost.

Nowadays we no longer need humans in this lower class sustaining the whole system, as we can automate all the labor and make every single human who's willing to learn an academic. Through AI and autonomous vehicles, I believe we can push humanity to its maximum potential, producing first necessity items and distributing them to everyone with certain control, we can feed the whole humanity without producing more (as this 2012 article say https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10440046.2012.695331?journalCode=wjsa20 ).

Also, the jobs "lost" by the full automation of first necessity items production won't create a legion of unemployed people dying from hunger, as

1) Everyone would have access to basic items;

2) Those people would be able to contribute to society in many other ways through intellectual and cultural production (i.e. art, entertainment, etc.).

Also, without the desperate need to make money in order to survive, people could dedicate their lives to what they really love, this way being way more productive working on a field they love but would normally pay less than a field they hate (which would make those people not really interested in expanding horizons as they only work for a paycheck).

Please, don't be shy and let's develop this idea together. Also, critics and opinions on the topic are more than welcome!

There's a chance that I made some grammar mistakes, please contact me if that's the case.