Recognition of AI entity DABUS as an inventor is a gigantic, unsure, step into the legal status of artificial intelligence, and it’s a major future issue for the law. It’s also the very first nano-step into recognizing artificial intelligence as a person.
DABUS is an artificial neural system. It thinks, plans, and predicts, as well as inventing. A new ruling by the Australian Federal Court has created legal recognition of its status as an acknowledged inventor on patent applications.
A few basics –
- There’s no One Size Fits All in artificial intelligence. Neural networks are trained artificial intelligences. They can learn under supervision, or unsupervised. This high level of autonomy is extremely important in understanding their fundamental potentials as individuals.
- They learn from various inputs and produce an output based on processing in ways similar to biological intelligence.
- They’re not programmed, which is their major and very significant difference with all other systems. They are effectively individuals by definition.
The current generation of AI has come a very long way, to the point it clearly requires legal status. This latest ruling is a significant, large, and probably permanent crack in the IP dam regarding the status of AI as inventors.
This is where it gets complicated
Artificial intelligences don’t yet have status as legal “people”. This ruling more or less takes them to the status of implied legal entities, which is a gigantic deal in many much less obvious ways.
This is vaguely like the status of a corporation as a legal entity if far less well-defined. For AI, however, there’s a blurry back end to this status. It means that people holding financial or other interests in AI have legal entitlements to AI inventions.
This simple-looking joining of commercial dots brings in a lot of people who otherwise wouldn’t have stakes in patents. Many stakeholders would have nothing to do with development except providing money. That’s another problem – Who’s steering the AI? Is this going to turn into just another money grab by Big Finance?
Enter Dr. Stephen L. Thaler
Thaler is a long-standing pioneer in artificial intelligence with a seemingly endless track record in AI back to the 1980s. The guy has spent that time working on AI in terms of consciousness, the classic science fiction idea, and making it work. For a somewhat mindblowing CV, see his bio on his company website, Imagination Engines Inc.com.
(Put it this way – He even simulated brain trauma and death in AI, and the AI relived all its life experiences… That mindblowing.)
Thaler’s other pastimes include making a very clear case for the status of AI as an inventor. One of Thaler’s key patents and most fundamental ideas is the “neural cascade”, which is a model of a stream of consciousness.
You can see where this is going. Thaler’s ideas are way ahead of the lumbering dung cart of law, which is overloaded with old precepts of legal person status that have nothing at all to do with AI. This AI IP win is quite possibly one of the first AI-specific legal outcomes for what may well become a whole new class of laws.
AI is coming in ways nobody understands yet with unanswerable questions
AI “people” aren’t at all hard to visualize. Take that a tiny bit further, and you could have AI corporations, AI philanthropic organizations, and AI social entities. It’s also likely to become a major personal property and rights issue. I did a blog recently on a sort of custom/DIY “personal AI”, which I see as being as unavoidable as phones in the obvious future. I had some great arguments with myself writing that one.
That’s all well and good in current terms. The problem is and will definitely become much more pressing – What is the status of AI legally? On what principles is that status based? That matters in so many ways.
Let’s run a simple chain of events:
- Will AI invent things and ideas that nobody has a name for yet? More than likely. How about a portable, transmissible version of yourself, for example? It’d be pretty useful.
- So – Will AI be able to create a “surrogate self”, not perhaps the upload-yourself-and-create-more-B-movies version, but a working version of oneself as a second self? It’s not even theoretically impossible now, just difficult. This idea is just a minor upgrade from Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.
- In that scenario, you could be in touch with thousands of other different AI people. A Cloud of AI people? Easy to visualize.
- Now the law – If the surrogate-self AI is a working detached version of you, is that a legal person? Why not? It obviously should be, for a lot of irrefutably good reasons. Do we need privacy laws for AI? Probably.
- Now blur a few lines very slightly – At what point does non-human AI become a functional person, in the same sense as a surrogate-self human AI? What’s the difference? Could be anything, but the legal status of “person” isn’t an arguable issue.
Tricky enough? That’s what’s coming, and it’s coming fast. A “human AI” could be Stephen Hawking, Leonardo Da Vinci, or just someone who needs AI like a disabled person who needs a more functional physical self. It could be someone who needs a way of interacting in multiple locations and staying organized, without schlepping themselves and their stuff all over the planet.
It could just be a quality of life thing. Want to go to Paris, write a review, drop off in Berlin to do some research, chat with colleagues, see an exhibition in New York, and then have lunch at home in Sydney? …And save on about 40 hours of travel? Your second self can do it all, exactly like being there.
How about if you don’t for some reason feel like dying, and have a spare dozen of your second self available? Not at all persuasive, is it? We’re talking about managing consciousness here. If it’s thinkable, it’s doable.
The irony is that this argument is already going a very long way beyond “Is Data a person” from Star Trek: The Next Generation. This is real-life incoming legal stuff with direct applications to an unquantifiable number of possible human personal and property issues.
This news will come looking for you, in NASA-like volumes, soon enough.
