The most prudent way forward is to be the idea guy, even business developer, and partner up with an engineer to start a business.
Programming is more than typing code. Its about design and architecture, and these things take a lot of experience to get it right (for whatever right means). Beyond that, it needs good amount of CS. Those of us who didn't study CS at university had to pick it up on job, which was no doubt fun, but also quite challenging. You need a lot of dedication to become good at CS (I am not claiming I am) and devs with steady job sort of have an incentive to become good. On the other hand, people who look at success of devs from outside hoping to tread their path but possess little necessary background have no idea how hard it is to become even reasonably good at it. I mean, surely one can cobble together stuff with Ruby, Python etc that have libraries for all possible tasks, but to sustain, improve and convert it into something successful is a mighty difficult task. And with your ambition to "work on my ideas, start a business and help make world a better place", you would need to be an absolute genius to manage to pull that off.
Now, you might well be an absolute genius, but chances are you would get bored going through the learning curve and experimenting. More than that, you would get frustrated that the ideas keep growing in your head but you have a long way to go before realizing them into reality. You would despair sooner or later and it wouldn't be pretty or healthy. I know this because I have been through this sort of a thing a few years back. While not a programming complete novice like you, I did find myself needing to learn C# and .NET from scratch in my early 30s after being a C++ dev all my life. It was just too much work and felt like waste of time - I could be building working things instead of writing toy programs. I gave up because, thankfully, after more pondering, I realized I could manage with C++.
So, what I instead suggest is to work on ideas while still working at the call center. Try imagining how the idea would work as a product. Iterate. Design it functionally without bothering about the implementation details, which you can discuss with the engineer you might partner with at a later point. Learn enough about technology of your choice in a top down approach. Don't try to become an engineer or learn it like an engineer, but become someone who can understand what engineers speak and gain enough insight to be able to ask further questions.
In other words, become (or stay) Pinkman instead of Mr White.