The whole idea of "there is no such thing as an original idea" is utterly stupid. It's just a hyperbole and some people are taking it literally.

Of course there are original ideas. "C is not an original idea, because it's just mixing A and B..." ok so there are only two possbilities:

1. Someone else did mixing A and B before. Okay then we can recursively find the first person who mixed A and B.

2. No one else did mixing A and B before. The "Mixing A and B" is a new idea.

For some incomprehensible reasons, people seem to accept "mixing A and B is not a new idea because A and B already exist." Like... why? Since the four basic nucleobase existed, there haven't been any new DNA creatures?

The real reason that it feels like there isn't new idea is simple: the "mixing" process happens gradually. Even if you come up with a really good "X + Z" idea, people (read: market) might not accept it because what they're familiar with is "X + Y".

So you put a bit of Z to make "X + 0.9Y + 0.1Z", and another person who is as smart as you makes "X + 0.8Y + 0.2Z"... then when "X + Z" is officially a thing, people outside think you smart-ass guys were all just copying & pasting each other.

> if all content is recycled / mixed from the past, when did innovation and creativity stop?

And the obvious answer of course is that recycling / mixing can be innovative and creative. The dichotomy only exists in our heads.

I believe this is because of how our culture choose to reward intelectual output. Your output needs to appear sufficiently original to be worthy of reward and protection.

For example a musician who creates a new song is not rewarded, in fact punished for naming all the influences they had coming in to said new song. (both morally, by people who would think less of them, and by lawsuits asking for a share of their profit.)

I have had exactly this argument before and this has always been my issue with the claim. I recall people saying this about music when I was in college, an example I find especially frustrating because, per my friends argument, all contemporary music is influenced by, say, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, 'the greats' etc, and nothing new can truly be created in the shadow of these classics. It's nuts because it ignores all of human civilization up to that point, and doesn't give credit to people in the present day for being able to be original.

But I think the way you have put it here is more clear than anything I've been able to manage. I think I put it in a more extreme form, which is to say that the earth had no life on it for ~3 billion years, and still no humans until ~100k years ago. At some point the first music was made. And if it could be original then, whatever it was that made that possible, should presumably make it possible now, too.

That "1%" original is almost always just 1% uncited/unknown inspiration.

If you listen to the stories of how things like major inventions came into being, it's almost always some domain expert visited some domain in which they were not an expert and inspiration struck on how to combine the domains.

Otherwise, the rest of invention is either human imitations or improvements to things found in nature or not inventions at all but discoveries stumbled upon by accident/experimentation.

Nothing is just willed into existence by pure "thought". Every thought you've had is a product of the things you've been surrounded by.

I think the simpler answer is that GP's assertion is just incorrect, and that humans regularly create genuinely original content.

I'd say it's possible that there have truly not been any original ideas, and the earliest human ideas might've been just remixing observed natural phenomena. What would muddy the waters there is that humans are complex organisms that in turn exhibit naturally complex behaviors both on an individual and a societal level. And there's even emotions that we feel due to our biology. But if you define all these as phenomena we observed about ourselves, I think my initial assertion still makes sense.

Combinatoric complexity blows up fast

Your comment immediately made me think of The Beatles. They are responsible for so many original things. They launched the album era and invented the concept album. They brought in entirely new instruments into rock music. They changed the culture around sexual expressiveness, and they introduced the western world to eastern philosophies.

But when you start to scrutinize everything they did, there are many clear examples of things and people that did those things first and directly influenced them. However, they may have been the first to do it in their specific flavor, which is undoubtedly original.

The most original thing I can think of that The Beatles did was add sound to the runoff track at the end of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, so that it keeps playing the sound infinitely until the needle is removed on the turntable. I’m sure someone with more insight can point to another musician doing that first, but at The Beatles’ scale, we collectively come to believe they were the first to do it.

> Philosophical food for thought: if all content is recycled / mixed from the past, when did innovation and creativity stop?

Somewhere around 2016, when the golden Age of Internet-Content ended, as the last undiscovered part was added to the mix...

But jokes aside, does innovation really need to be new? Or would it still innovative if you don't know it when you create something you for you? Take for example all the retro-waves which regularly come back, where people discover something for them completely new, and make up some for them completely new things, which the generations for them already did long ago.

> In other words, if there is truly no such thing as an "original idea"

Does Original mean 100% new? And would it demand that all parts are new, or would it still original if we just arrange old parts in a new way?

I think this is purely a statistics problem. Like all breakthroughs are actually _discoveries_ of things that already do exist or mechanisms that can be exploited somehow.

There is a huge amount of information flowing around us in realtime, and linking some thought/thing to something else, which then might have implications (subsequent discoveries) is statistics. We do have people with a better wetware so they have increased %chance do recognize something in front of them as well as linking it in a "novel way", but this is not really neccessary, it only increases %chances.

Even pretty radical things can be explained this exact way, up to having some sort of brain "damage" (or drugs like LSD) that changes mental pathways and have a %chance to be actually right and lead to discoveries, but also the %chance here is very low. (not every trip is a breakthrough in art/science, right?)... a bit like iE people that can smell sounds or link some natural phenomenon with an emotional situation between some people and write about it.

> peak human innovation

that might simply a nonsense question if you follow my previous argument. there simply is no real "innovation" - only "discoveries" of stuff. and we meatbags with very limitied/unreliable wetware at some point can't "progress" any more, but non-biologically flawed systems might overcome our limitations and do just that for us.

with our naked eyes, we cannot see things like infrared light, but it exists and some tools helped us to understand everything around it somewhat. now we're building more advanced tooling to get through the next plateaus - just like we have to build very sophisticated tooling to watch further into space or more closely into fractions of atoms, which in turn lead to more discoveries, and ultimately "innovation" we can feel in our lives.

the only thing I will 100% agree to is that a real AGI will be the _last_ discovery/innovation humanity will ever make - and that is a good thing - it means we finally overcome our biological limits somewhat.

There's nothin' you can do that can't be done

Nothin' you can sing that can't be sung

Nothin' you can say, but you can learn how to play the game

It's easy

Nothin' you can make that can't be made

No one you can save that can't be saved

Nothin' you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time

It's easy

All you need is love

That seems like a straightforward one; if humans are incapable of original thought then the original part probably came from sources that are not human and 'innovation' in the sense of 'an AI couldn't do this' never existed. We just need to make the AI better at interfacing with the real source of novelty - reality - than the current method of trying to interpret existing pictures on the internet.

There will be a big leap forward when we get to teaching these things from video streams so they can get the concept of 3D properly.

"Why did innovation and creativity stop" because ideas are remixed is like saying when do the flowers stop blooming because the sun exists. The sun is an integral piece of why flowers grow.

Read How to Ride a Bicycle. Human creativity is just a lot of work, often connecting novel ideas together while doing so.

Recycling / remixing content from the past *is* innovation and creativity.

> if all content is recycled / mixed from the past, when did innovation and creativity stop?

Your question contains the answer. Remixing begets innovation / creativity begets remixing.

It's just something people say lazily in passing without giving much actual thought to why they're repeating what they saw somewhere else in a similar thread.

Creativity and innovation didn't ever stop.

Its only words and concepts and we keep inventing new ones constantly. We also imbue new meaning to words and concepts over time.

>In other words, if there is truly no such thing as an "original idea", then how did the ideas that we are pulling from, deriving from and combining come into existence?

By observing nature, and then iterating on that over thousands of years of culture. Of course the question is whether and to what degree the process of iteration and transformation matters.

How would you define an "original idea?" An idea with no origin or source, that spontaneously manifests from the aether? That isn't possible, everything must be extrapolated from something prior.

Yes, it's more accurate to say that ideas exist on a spectrum of novelty, with varying degrees of originality.

> when did innovation and creativity stop?

Or did it ever stop ?

it is like they say "there's nothing new under the sun, but maybe behind it?"