I struggle to believe that AI R&D is ingenious

Re:I struggle to believe that AI R&D is ingenious by saulpw on Friday November 06, 2026 @04:36PM (#50398845)

Truly new ideas are, say, 0.01% of all 'novel' ideas, with the rest being rehashing or recombinations. And even then, the truly new kernel of the truly new idea is some small fraction of the whole thing. Like Einstein's theories of relativity, they were truly fresh, but mostly had to recombine existing work in 'novel' ways.

So it's not there are zero new ideas, but so few compared to the whole of the intellectual domain, that we can say 'there are no new ideas under the sun' and be basically correct to within a small rounding error. And AI is sufficiently ingenious to serve the needs of the vast majority of humanity, even though we'll still need to find/cultivate/inspire some new genius humans if we want to have more truly new ideas in the future.

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Re:I struggle to believe that AI R&D is ingenious by pixl97 on Saturday November 07, 2026 @05:52PM (#50408798)

I don't think humans really comprehend how many ideas the universe already presents us with. After that it is literally impossible for all those combinations to be tried in a universe with finite time and entropy. The idea of novel may simply be humanity mistaking a new idea for emergence at scale.

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