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| Corporate overlord: The Colossus of Rhodes as visualized in the 1911 Grolier Encyclopedia, via Wikipedia. |
National Review's human exceptionalism troll (I'm not kidding, that's really a thing, situating anti-abortion arguments in a frame of hysterical H. sapiens species patriotism) Wesley J. Smith has found something new to panic about:
In order to receive a patent, the subject of the protection must be a human invention.Some want to change that and allow computers programmed to “artificial intelligence” sophistication to receive patents. From the Science Daily story:New research published by the University of Surrey in Boston College Law Review is calling for inventions by computers to be legally granted patents.
The research states that the rapid increase in computer power is posing new challenges when it comes to patenting an invention. Artificial intelligence is playing an ever larger role in innovation — with major players such as IBM, Pfizer and Google investing heavily in creative computing — but current patent law does not recognise computers as inventors.
Without a change in the law, the findings warn that there will be less innovation, caused by uncertainty, which would prevent industry from capitalising on the huge potential of creative computers. We are also likely to see disputes over inventorship, with individuals taking credit for inventions that are not genuinely theirs.
