[karmakaze]

> And can anything truly novel be created by a technology that feeds on what already exists?

When I was very young, I used to make up jokes that didn't really make sense, but they seemed novel and I cracked myself up. Late in life I wondered what truly original idea(s) I've had that wasn't an extension or mashup of existing ones or I'd learned from somewhere even subconsciously. It was very hard to come up with any. So this fault like many others that can be ascribed to machines can equally apply to ourselves.

I did finally think of a few, the clearest being the idea of 2*Pi being more fundamental than Pi back when I was in grade 7 math (I can visualize the room and lesson when the thought occurred to me) back in '77 long before I learned of Tau.