Throughout history, innovation has been the result of direct
human intervention that creates a technical solution to a practical
problem. For hundreds of years, nations around the world have
sought to incentivize innovation by giving inventors the right to
protect their creations with patents. Recently one legal team has
pressured patent offices around the world to answer one question:
Can patent protections be extended to inventions developed by
technology, not humans?
Late last autumn, patent applications were filed with the UK
Intellectual Property Office and the European Patent Office on
behalf of an artificial intelligence inventor known as
"DABUS," which creates new ideas by altering the
interconnections among a set of neural networks in the system. Once
those ideas are generated, a second set of neural networks analyzes
them to reinforce any that are novel or useful. DABUS is the
invention of Dr. Stephen Thaler, President and CEO of the St.
Charles,
