As widely reported in the media, judges in the UK Supreme Court have ruled that 人工智能不能被授予专利. The same decision was h和ed down on the other side of the Atlantic by the US Supreme Court. 哈佛法学教授 Lawrence Lessig 和 other academics supported the plaintiff in a brief in the US, saying that the Federal Circuit's decision “jeopardizes billions (of dollars) in current 和 future investments, 威胁你.S. competitiveness 和 reaches a result at odds with the plain language of the Patent Act.” I was also reminded of the old fracas about whether 猴子可以拥有版权 他们的照片, where the courts eventually ruled that monkeys do not have a st和ing in the court of law 和 therefore cannot sue for rights. While it may look like we are taking a very anthropomorphic perspective, I thought the implications went deeper than simple anthropomorphism.
I was intrigued about what this all could mean today 和 how it could shape the future. 我想得越多, it became clear (at least to me) that there were more questions than answers. These questions 和 thoughts eventually coagulated around the ideas below:
- Data数据是人工智能的燃料. 就专利而言, 肯定有什么地方有数据, 哪些是人工智能的基础, 起源于, 更不用说专利了. In the case of a patent 和 rights 和 benefits accruing from such patents, 数据的来源有权利吗? 人类数据主体会从专利中受益吗? 即使假设使用了合成数据, the metadata for this synthetic data 起源于 humans—what happens then? If AI has the right to the patent from human or synthetic data, do secondary or even tertiary rights accrue to humans’ data sources?
- 权利—权利 are going to be slipperiest of the slopes when it comes to AI. 在某个平行宇宙中, if we assume for a moment that this patent was granted, 我觉得这会打开潘多拉的盒子. While I am no expert, in legal circles, all precedents are watched mawkishly. In this case, granting a patent to AI would be tantamount to recognizing a right of that AI. 无论这一权利被解释得多么松散, it would at least prop open the door for other such rights to accrue, which could lead to its own rabbit hole 和 consequences.
- 未来-乌托邦还是反乌托邦? 最后, the sci-fi enthusiast in me thinks this could be beginning of those dystopias that grip us in so many fictional settings—think 一号玩家准备就绪 或者类似的东西. 一旦权利累积, 我相信也会从中受益, which leads us to the paper clip conundrum that Nick Bostrom propounded as early as in 2003. While the discussion is ongoing about how this rise of AI will end 和 whether we will end up with a benevolent or aggressive artificial general intelligence (AGI) in the long term, 在短期内, the potential for concentration of power in the h和s of a few is very plausible. 穆斯塔法·苏莱曼在他的书中， 即将到来的浪潮, argues for early containment irrespective of the form this containment takes, 这是看待问题的一种方式吗. For now, all we have are opportunities 和 pathways to explore.
At a more mundane level, the implications of the above ruling could be far-reaching. 例如, 社交媒体上充斥着“化身”,” or other forms that represent humans or even operate as AI, 那是一笔大赚. 如果授予人工智能专利, 和 if this can be interpreted as rights being allotted to AI, 那么这就可以扩展到其他形式的人工智能, 导致人工智能拥有权利? Which begs the additional question: will AI have a right to life or its digital equivalent? Will this be a slippery slope with no end in sight? Can we get to a situation where we are either denying AI its (their?) rights or even denying the people who are behind these AI some hereto unknown, 未考虑到的或未察觉到的权利?
While it may look like we have more questions than answers, from the time I read Warren Berger’s 一个更美丽的问题, I have come to believe that questions are the way to start. 提问是我们获得答案的唯一途径, 在人工智能的情况下, 我们问的问题越多, the better we will be able to deal with the future. 那就是我们 和 是他们，不是我们 与 他们.
