Patently-O Bits and Bytes by Juvan Bonni

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17 thoughts on “Patently-O Bits and Bytes by Juvan Bonni

  1. 5

    From: link to livescience.com

    “A senior software engineer at Google was suspended on Monday (June 13) after sharing transcripts of a conversation with an artificial intelligence (AI) that he claimed to be “sentient,” according to media reports. The engineer, 41-year-old Blake Lemoine, was put on paid leave for breaching Google’s confidentiality policy”

    Ok, one way to test it is to ask her to:

    1. Invent something new, unobvious, and useful;

    2. Get a patent for it;

    and don’t tell anyone she is doing it until the patent is issued.

    It will be interesting just to see how she deals with the examiner. She might be useful just to do that. (And then you guys will have to find something else to do.)

    Even better, ask her to design a practical nuclear fusion reactor.

    Is the Nobel Committee limited to awarding the Nobel Prize to a human?

    1. 5.1

      and don’t tell anyone she is doing it until the patent is issued.

      You do realize that attorneys may not do this, right?

      Bad for the product.
      Bad for the practitioner.

    2. 5.2

      Lemoine seems to have failed the inverse Turing test (where an interrogator is asked to differentiate a human from a computer that most other people would agree fails the Turing test).

      1. 5.2.1

        Trying to figure out the politically correct thing to do here.

        Do we credit his “lived experience?” Do we validate his “feelings” that the AI has gained sentience?

  2. 4

    One would think that Big Tech mouthpieces like Roslyn (Forbes article) would grow weary of regurgitating the shown-to-be-false troll fallacies.

    Such regurgitation has proven to be bad for ones health.

    Burp.

  3. 3

    From the Nature article:

    >An AI system built to review all information published about an area of technology before it invents would possess a much larger body of knowledge than any human could. Assessed against all knowledge, almost everything would seem obvious

    “All knowledge” is already the standard for humans.

    >Inventions generated by AI challenge the patent system in a new way because the issue is about ‘who’ did the inventing, rather than ‘what’ was invented.

    Until the Fed Circuit realizes that what machine learning models actually do is discover “natural relationships” hidden in large data sets, and then, concludes that no “use of AI” claim is patentable under 101…

    (OTOH, somewhat counter-intuitively, the USPTO seems to love it when you add “using an ai model” to claims).

    1. 3.1

      Good “all knowledge” observation. The typical stunning ignorance exhibited in these papers.

      But, I’d say with AI you have it wrong. AI is learning functions and can learn anything a human can or soon will be able to. There are plenty of 101 phrases already that they could use to render all software ineligible and everything invented by AI as ineligible under 101.

      The Church-Turing Thesis is apparently unknown in the halls of the CAFC.

      1. 3.1.1

        And while not disagreeing, I would merely add that “soft” is but a patent-equivalent (note the yahoos will attempt to err with “exactly equal as”) as ANY of the design choices of “wares” — hard, firm, soft — in the computing arts.

    2. 3.2

      OC – very nice.

      One of the linked articles does delve into shades of “AI” (that the term is so loosely used for the entire spectrum IS problematic).

      My use excludes use-as-a-tool elements (such as machine learning) and I would differentiate that what is being attempted with the likes of DABUS is simply not to be understood as “mere use as a tool.”

      This point though is oft times (seemingly purposefully) conflated and confused.

  4. 2

    Some have wondered about “narrative,” while others have sought to deny that such exist here (while still others, well, one, will do a hard Sprint Left//Push Central Guy Down and Whine, One Bucket approach)…

    I was appalled at the selected articles, and wanted to know more about the writers of these articles.

    The Prof’s at Nature do not include a ready link to their background.

    I had a little easier time with the author of the Fortune article.

    She has long studied tech from an Econ viewpoint, appears to be concerned about international politics, but otherwise seemed to have imbibed greatly from the Efficient Infringer mantra (especially missing the basic understanding about patents being a negative right, and instead wants to weaken patents for the benefit of those who “make products.”

    One item that grabbed my attention though was that from: link to http:

    we see that the selected article from her was actually four down on her archive list, AND had the lowest – by far – number of views.

    Clearly, the selection itself IS a part of the narrative here.

    As to the Prof’s at Nature, it appears that AI is outside of their wheelhouse, so there they try to take a somewhat even keel approach. Sadly, their bias is exposed in their choice of repeating a debunked fallacy on patents preventing COVID vaccine manufacturing.

    1. 2.2

      I knew one of these people that generate anti-patent propaganda that is constantly referenced on this blog. Our children were friends so I got chance to dig a bit into what was going on. It is all about money. They were paying him huge sums of money to generate articles for the popular press and he didn’t really know anything about intellectual property. He could not even answer basic questions. But he was good at putting his name on the articles and he was a really good writer.

      You can’t believe the money behind all this. I was very jealous as the house he bought was worth about 10 times the house I could afford and all he did was generate propaganda.

      1. 2.2.1

        It does constantly shock me that this blog is so anti-patent and that its ethics division is a complete joke that does not address the fundamental ethical issues of our time.

        (I can’t say that I wasn’t drawn to the dark side as the money is great.)

    1. 1.1

      You can see almost half of them are from just one firm, yeah? And another firm also has two. I would agree with you that it’s a long list of openings though.

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