Posts
While Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been known as a
scientific discipline since the 1950s, companies have only begun to
use it significantly in internal processes and their products
during the last 10 years. This is because the necessary computing
power and mass data storage have only been available at
economically reasonable costs for a few years. Prominent examples
are the supercomputers Watson (IBM) and AlphaGo Master
(DeepMind/Alphabet) that can win Jeopardy, beat chess grandmasters
and play the highly complex game of Go better than any human
being.
AI has also found its way into many commercial products, like (self-driving) cars, marketing optimization, translation software, chatbots, predictive maintenance and medical diagnosis by Dr. Richard Brunner, Chief Legal Officer.
 |
| The Reasonable Robot |
It even supports lawyers in due diligence tasks, research and analytics of case law and prior art, as well as contract automation (drafting, negotiation, and archiving). Deloitte's recent study suggests that ninety percent of seasoned adopters believe that AI is "very" or "critically" important to their business today.
The adoption of AI is a fact that cannot, and should not, be avoided. Nevertheless, by raising fears of unemployment and supremacy over human beings, it needs to be the subject of legal regulation. The challenge of developing AI law is to provide sufficient incentive to invest in research and AI-supported applications, while at the same time protecting humans. Not only from harsh economic consequences, but also discrimination, state and corporate surveillance, and irrepressible actions of independent-acting AI against human welfare's interests.
This is precisely where patent attorney and law professor Ryan Abbott's book, "The Reasonable Robot – Artificial Intelligence and the Law," comes into play. It not only raises questions of how to deal with AI from a tax, tort, Intellectual Property and criminal law perspective but also suggests answers. Ryan Abbott advocates for "AI legal neutrality," even in the assessment of tort liability. According to this concept, the same legal standards should apply by default, whether it was a human actor or an AI that caused damage...
Artificial intelligence versus the human inventor
A focus of the book revolves around the patentability of inventions created by AI, and how the use of AI in R&D impacts the "obviousness" of an invention and the "skilled person" test. As an initiator of the Artificial Inventor Project, which transparently applies for patents for inventions developed by an AI called DABUS, Abbott believes that it is in society's best interest to grant patent protection to AI-generated inventions. This creates an incentive for innovation, which is the very reason for IP protection. However, while current patent laws may not be flawed, they need to be adapted to address the direction in which technology is headed. The author argues that this allows us to take stock and rethink how IP can benefit society.
Source: Mondaq News Alerts
