I've been thinking about AI, Star Wars, and music, and inadvertently come to the same conclusion: the new stuff is just interpolating, not innovating. What do I mean?

Interpolation for me, with my science background, mmeans a graph and having lots of data and joining the dots in a meanful way so you can see and predict values where there are no values. There are risks with this approach, people want to see the data which matches thier theory rather than what is there. I've seen many "straight" lines which are clearly random or have a massive curve. This graph shows the points and the line joining them, here is a perfect solution.

Interpolation in the wider world is safe—we have common reference points and want to tread safe waters between our known material and make lots of money. That is why Star Wars is obsessed with the time of the Rebellion in Episode IV. It’s safe, popular, and you can't screw it up.

This is all the new wave of AI is doing. It won’t do anything amazingly new; it takes data plots from many sources and puts them together for you. It’s a new result, but it is still on the curve.

This is a great example of music interpolation:

So, what does this mean? As things become expensive (music, AI, space adventures), the value of the investment must guarantee returns. Therefore, we can't venture outside the known data points, so we revisit, fill in all the gaps, and effectively pad the universe, resulting in its cold death. Experimentation is too risky; we must be safe. It sounds a lot like the 1950s before rock 'n' roll.

Maybe the path of the hero is to sell my speeder, take a flying heap of junk, and see where and to whom it takes me.