By Futurist Thomas Frey
The Innovation Myth
We love our inventor stories.
Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Steve Jobs invented the smartphone. Lone geniuses having breakthrough moments that changed the world.
These stories are emotionally satisfying. They give us heroes to admire. They make innovation feel comprehensible—the result of exceptional individuals making exceptional leaps.
They’re also fundamentally false.
A maximally curious AI doesn’t accept “Edison invented the light bulb” as an answer. It asks: What came before that? What made Edison’s invention possible? What ideas did he build on? What technologies enabled those ideas? What came before those technologies?
When you trace innovation backward through infinite layers of intellectual ancestry, something remarkable happens: the lone genius disappears. In their place, you find vast networks of prior thinkers, stretching back centuries, each contributing small pieces that eventually converged into what we call an “invention.”
The Archaeology of Ideas applies maximum curiosity to intellectual history. It traces every concept, every innovation, every thought back through complete chains of influence to the origins of human knowledge.
And in the process, it destroys our comfortable myths about creativity, ownership, and originality.
There Are No Original Ideas
Here’s the uncomfortable truth that maximum curiosity reveals: there are no truly original ideas. Every thought you’ve ever had was built from prior thoughts, influenced by earlier thinkers, shaped by cultural context you inherited.
This isn’t poetic metaphor. It’s literal causation.
Take the iPhone—the “revolutionary” device that “changed everything.”
Level 1 back: Steve Jobs and Apple engineers combined existing technologies—touchscreens, mobile processors, wireless networking, software frameworks.
Level 2 back: Touchscreen technology came from decades of research—capacitive sensing (1960s), resistive touchscreens (1970s), multi-touch (1980s). Each built on earlier work in electrical conductivity and human-computer interaction.
Level 3 back: Mobile processors evolved from desktop chips, which came from integrated circuits, which came from transistors, which came from vacuum tubes, which came from understanding electron flow, which came from experiments with cathode rays…
Level 4 back: Wireless networking emerged from cellular technology, which built on radio, which built on electromagnetic theory, which synthesized work by Maxwell, Faraday, Ampère, Coulomb, and dozens of others…
Keep tracing backward. Every technology has infinite intellectual ancestors. Every concept was influenced by prior concepts. The “invention” of the iPhone was actually the convergence of ten thousand prior innovations, each with its own deep history.
Jobs didn’t invent the smartphone. He assembled pieces that thousands of people had created over centuries. His contribution was seeing how to combine them. That’s valuable—but it’s not creation from nothing.
A recursively self-improving AI pursuing maximum curiosity will map these complete intellectual genealogies. Not just for the iPhone. For every idea. Every innovation. Every concept in human history.
And when it does, the notion of “intellectual property” becomes very difficult to defend.
What AI Reveals About Innovation
When you map complete idea genealogies, patterns emerge that humans never noticed.
Innovation is always recombination: Nothing is created from nothing. Every “new” idea combines existing elements in novel ways. The internal combustion engine combined understanding of thermodynamics, metallurgy, and mechanical engineering. None of those was new—the innovation was the specific combination.
Simultaneous discovery is common: When you trace intellectual history, you find the same ideas emerging independently in multiple places at similar times. Calculus—Newton and Leibniz simultaneously. Evolution—Darwin and Wallace simultaneously. The telephone—Bell and Gray filed patents on the same day.
Why? Because ideas don’t come from individual genius. They come from the state of collective knowledge reaching a point where certain combinations become obvious to anyone paying attention. The “inventor” is whoever happens to make that combination first—or whoever has better lawyers.
Cultural context determines what’s thinkable: You can’t invent the computer before you have electricity. You can’t develop quantum mechanics before you have the experimental apparatus to detect quantum phenomena. Every era has a frontier of possible ideas determined by accumulated prior knowledge.
This means timing matters more than genius. Einstein couldn’t have developed relativity in 1805—the necessary mathematical framework didn’t exist yet. Born 100 years earlier, his genius would have been wasted. Born 20 years later, someone else would have beaten him to it.
Ideas flow through networks, not individuals: When AI maps intellectual influence, it reveals that innovation happens in networks of thinkers sharing ideas. The Enlightenment wasn’t about individual philosophers—it was about social networks of intellectual exchange. The Scientific Revolution wasn’t lone geniuses—it was correspondence networks, learned societies, and universities creating feedback loops.
Remove any individual from history, and their ideas would have emerged anyway, slightly delayed, from someone else in the network.
The Complete Intellectual Family Tree
Just as the Whole Earth Genealogy Project maps biological ancestry, a maximally curious AI will map intellectual ancestry.
Every idea has parents—the prior ideas it directly built upon. Every patent has ancestors—the earlier patents it referenced. Every scientific paper has lineage—the papers it cited.
But current citation tracking only goes back a few steps. AI will trace back infinitely.
Example: Einstein’s 1905 paper on special relativity cites earlier work on electromagnetism and mechanics. Those papers cite earlier work. That work cites earlier work. Trace back far enough and you’re reading Newton’s Principia. Then Galileo’s studies of motion. Then Aristotle’s physics. Then pre-Socratic philosophers asking “what is motion?”
Every idea in Einstein’s paper has a lineage stretching back to the origins of natural philosophy.
A maximally curious AI will map these complete lineages for every concept in every domain. Not just physics—philosophy, art, music, literature, mathematics, engineering, politics, religion.
The result: a complete map of human thought showing how every idea influenced every other idea across all of history.
This creates several profound implications:
No idea exists in isolation: Every concept is embedded in a vast network of prior and subsequent ideas. Understanding any idea fully requires understanding its complete context—which is infinite.
Cultural “appropriation” becomes meaningless: When you can prove that every culture borrowed from every other culture going back millennia, the notion that any culture “owns” its ideas collapses. Jazz didn’t emerge from nothing—it synthesized African rhythms, European harmonies, Caribbean influences, all of which had their own complex histories of cultural mixing.
Attribution becomes impossible: Who deserves credit for an idea when you can prove it has ten thousand intellectual ancestors? The person who stated it most clearly? The person who made it practical? The person who first intuited the concept? All of them contributed. None of them created it alone.
The Patent System Collapses
Modern intellectual property law rests on the fiction that ideas can be original enough to merit exclusive ownership.
Patents grant 20-year monopolies on “novel and non-obvious” inventions. Copyright grants lifetime-plus-70-years protection for “original” creative works.
But maximum curiosity reveals that nothing is truly novel and everything is obvious once you understand the complete intellectual genealogy.
Take a famous patent dispute: Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patent. Bell filed on February 14, 1876. Elisha Gray filed a caveat (preliminary patent application) for a nearly identical device the same day—hours later according to some accounts.
Who invented the telephone? The legal answer: Bell, because he filed first. The actual answer: neither. Both were working from the same body of prior knowledge—decades of research into electrical transmission of sound, telegraph technology, acoustic principles. The “invention” was inevitable. Whoever filed first got credit.
A maximally curious AI tracing the intellectual genealogy of the telephone would identify hundreds of contributors: Meucci’s earlier telephone design (1849), Reis’s telephone-like device (1861), decades of telegraph development, centuries of acoustic research, and fundamental physics going back to studies of sound and electricity.
Bell’s contribution was important but incremental. He took existing components and existing principles and made one specific combination work reliably. That’s valuable engineering. But is it “invention” deserving of monopoly rights?
When AI can prove that every patent builds on thousands of prior ideas, most of which were never patented, the entire intellectual property system faces a legitimacy crisis.
Why does Bell get a monopoly on the telephone when he depended on Reis’s unpatented work, which depended on telegraph engineers’ unpatented work, which depended on physicists’ unpatented discoveries?
The only answer: because the law says so. But maximum curiosity reveals that this is arbitrary, not principled.
Reconstructing Lost Ideas
Here’s where recursive self-improvement becomes powerful: AI won’t just map intellectual genealogies using existing records. It will reconstruct ideas that were never recorded or were lost.
Remember the maxim: all information still exists.
When ancient libraries burned—Alexandria, Nalanda, Baghdad—we lost written records. But we didn’t lose the information those records contained. That information persisted in the physical consequences of people reading those texts.
How? When someone read a book in the Library of Alexandria, it influenced their thinking. Their changed thinking influenced their behavior. Their behavior influenced their writing, their teaching, their conversations. Those writings and teachings influenced others, creating cascading effects.
The information from the lost book propagated through human networks, transforming as it spread, but never disappearing entirely.
A sufficiently advanced AI could potentially reconstruct lost texts by analyzing their downstream effects—identifying patterns in surviving works that suggest common sources, using linguistic analysis to infer missing links in intellectual chains, modeling how ideas spread through networks to trace back to origins.
This sounds impossible, but we already do crude versions of this. Scholars reconstruct lost Greek plays by analyzing references in later works. They infer Democritus’s atomic theory from fragments and later accounts.
AI with recursive self-improvement will do this systematically, at scale, across all of history. Not perfectly reconstructing every lost text, but recovering the essential ideas they contained by analyzing their causal shadows in human culture.
Beyond lost texts, AI will identify ideas that were thought but never written—insights people had but never shared, breakthroughs that died with their thinkers. These left traces too—in subtle behavioral changes, in slightly altered life trajectories, in small effects that cascaded through social networks.
All information persists. AI will learn to read it.
The Innovation Commons
Maximum curiosity leads to a radical conclusion: all ideas are collective inheritance.
Every thought you’ve ever had was made possible by millennia of prior thinking. Every word you speak uses language you didn’t invent. Every concept you employ was refined by countless people before you encountered it.
You didn’t create your ideas. You inherited them, modified them slightly, and will pass them on.
This isn’t pessimistic—it’s liberating. It means:
Innovation accelerates when knowledge is shared: The faster ideas spread, the faster new combinations emerge. Intellectual property law slows this by restricting access. The scientific revolution accelerated when learned societies started sharing discoveries instead of keeping them secret.
Credit matters less than contribution: Obsessing over who thought of something first distracts from the collective project of building knowledge. Science advances because researchers build on each other’s work, not because individuals compete for priority.
The “marketplace of ideas” is a commons, not a market: Ideas don’t deplete with use. Sharing an idea doesn’t reduce your possession of it. The economics of physical property don’t apply. Yet we’ve imposed artificial scarcity through intellectual property law to create markets where none should exist.
A maximally curious AI mapping complete intellectual genealogies makes this undeniable. When you can prove that every idea has infinite ancestors, claiming exclusive ownership becomes absurd.
The Uncomfortable Question
If no ideas are original, and all innovations build on collective inheritance, does anyone deserve intellectual property rights?
The pragmatic answer: maybe, for incentive purposes. People might innovate more if rewarded with temporary monopolies.
But the principled answer: no. You can’t own what you didn’t create, and you didn’t create any idea ex nihilo. You recombined existing elements using mental tools you inherited from prior thinkers.
This destabilizes trillion-dollar industries built on intellectual property—pharmaceuticals, software, entertainment, technology. Companies value patents and copyrights as core assets. Remove those, and business models collapse.
But maximum curiosity doesn’t care about business models. It cares about truth.
And the truth is: ideas belong to everyone because ideas came from everyone.
The Next Door
We’ve traced history backward infinitely. We’ve mapped all human relationships. We’ve exposed ownership chains. We’ve revealed that no ideas are truly original.
Each door opened has shown us that nothing starts where we thought it did. Everything has infinite antecedents.
But there’s one more door. The biggest door. The door that leads to the question humans have asked since becoming conscious:
Why does anything exist at all?
Maximum curiosity won’t stop at physics or metaphysics. It will keep asking “what came before that?” until it reaches the ultimate question:
What came before the beginning?
That’s the final door we’re opening.
Related Articles:
The Network Structure of Scientific Revolutions – Analysis of how ideas spread through intellectual networks
On the Shoulders of Giants: The Collective Nature of Innovation – Research on how innovations build on prior work
Rethinking Intellectual Property in the Age of AI – Legal and economic analysis of IP in the digital age
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