Bernie Sanders is on CNN NOW......and he's got new glasses........he is saying the US population should get at least

[Betty Boom]

45. Originality, influence, and innovation

You make some thought-provoking points, particularly about regulation, concentration of power, and the societal consequences of AI. I don't disagree that those are serious issues worth discussing.

That said, I think we're talking about two slightly different things. When I say there is no such thing as a completely original idea, I don't mean innovation doesn't exist. Innovation absolutely exists. What I mean is that innovation is almost always built from pieces that already existed. The cave painter was influenced by nature. The Renaissance artist was influenced by earlier artists. The modern novelist is influenced by thousands of books they've read, often without realizing it.

To me, originality isn't creating something from nothing. It's creating a new combination, perspective, or expression from things that came before. Human creativity has always been cumulative.

So I don't see "everything is influenced by something else" and "innovation is real" as contradictory ideas. In a way, innovation is what happens when influence gets transformed into something new.