Whose Idea Is It?

The trend of the current inventions is to make machines beat the Turing Test. The side-effect of this attempt is to figure out the best way to make a fool out of Humans. The result being Machine Learning Algorithms are figuring out how to play chess, compose music and create art better than humans and to the extent that it is impossible for humans to comprehend the process and keep up.

In chess, Machine Learning is already making moves that Humans are incapable of (in the short term atleast), such as the totally unique moves made by AlphaGoZero. Humans maintain that machines cannot “understand” chess like Humans do. Magnus Carlsen thinks that there will always be something beyond “intelligence” both human and machine as far as Chess is concerned. Everyone accepts both the Machine and Magnus Carlsen, but no one understands Why Magnus says so and why Machines are “consistently” getting better in Chess.

In music, machine learning robots is composing music that is actually pleasing to human ears, by analyzing thousands of music pieces from all over the world. The average listener cannot identify if the composer is a software or human. Maybe AR Rahman or Hans Zimmer can identify which is which or maybe not.

Algorithms and machines that fool humans are already here eg; social media, but the machines that make us “feel and believe” that a human is in charge ( when actually not) may not be in commercial use. Therefore, as of now, the Algorithm, robots are property of the corporations that is manned by humans. Commercial Use is a very important requirement for an invention to enter into the legal spectrum of Intellectual Property.

But, soon, the question will arise, whose intellectual property a particular music piece is or a autonomous killer drone. If a self-driving car drives in a totally original way of driving unknowable to humans capable of commercial application, who will own that intellectual property?? and only a very small group of elite humans can surpass machines in creative thinking eg; Magnus Carlsen, what will be the nature of Intellectual Property regime as it exists today?

The current Intellectual Property Regime all over the world is based on the principle that, any human who is capable of an idea that can be crystallised into a method capable of industrial process resulting in something of commercial value is entitled to own the application of the Idea as Intellectual Property. The idea becomes intellectual property only when it satisfies all the steps – novelty of application, a replicatable process and commercial usage. I am speaking from a very general perspective. There are of course differences in the different forms of intellectual property recognitions, but no one can deny that, the ultimate goal of the regime is to ensure commercial viability. To this day, ideas that are capable of being transposed into commercial products are alone protected as Intellectual Property.

When humans got fooled or surprised by the music, chess or art resulting from machine learning that was understood to be impossible for Humans to concieve, a historical event took place.

Intelligence got decoupled from Consciousness.

Only Sentient beings are capable of Consciousness. Until the last few centuries, only humans were thought to be intelligent beings because they are the only “Sentient” beings around, not only in the world but in the entire universe. We have not yet recognized animals as “Sentient” beings fully. The Humanistic view has resulted in both prosperity for Humans and unimaginable misery for animals. We haven’t solved that problem yet, but we have decoupled Intelligence from Consciousness and scratching our heads!

Now, when we have successfully decoupled Intelligence from Consciousness, we have a Competitor for IP !!. The Machine can create unique ideas. One may say that machines cannot sue, but humans can sue! Say X sues Y alleging that, a song of X was copied by a machine learning algorithm by making changes to the original song, but X is consciously aware that, the impugned song when sung is so closely similar to song made by X? Then, it falls to Y to prove otherwise and X to prove the awareness of similarity.

X or Y may feel very strongly about their case, yet, the machine can fool X or Y with sufficient data. In contrast, a machine if given sufficient data can also come up with a totally unique song that is totally unknown to anyone much less X or Y and find a totally new way of marketing the song that becomes a commercial hit. Humans feel music and songs become hits because it makes humans “feel” something. Feelings are not immune from “intelligence engineering”. Emotions are a part of Intelligence – Emotional Intelligence Duh!!. Thus, a song can become commercially hit, not because of its music but because, an algorithm projects it as a hit and engineers feelings.. A Machine cannot feel, but it can induce feelings into humans by computing the emotional data of humans. And humans have been giving away their emotional data like water, this is no secret.

A machine can be trained to spot lies such as false claims of novelty or prior adoption or even project commercial value and thus negate claims of both X or Y. The only way to shed some light on the dispute would be to examine the code of the algorithm and its data – another intellectual property. If A third party A Company owns it, the company A would object to the examination. If Y owns it, Y may object to the code being opened as it would ruin the business of Y. If X is the owner, then the case smacks of an espionage thriller.

There are no easy answers in this scenario. On the whole, the machine holds the humans like puppets on strings.

This sort of paints humans like “intelligent” apes, but apes nevertheless. Though it may be scientific fact, we humans have never admitted to be just Apes, unless we wanted to abuse someone. There is a new word "Monkeygate" thanks to the Australian Cricket Team.

One can say that, to be “intelligent” today is to have the singular capacity of converting ideas into commercial value, it doesn’t matter who thought it, it doesn’t matter whether the being that thought was even human. Emotionally Intelligent means feeling the commercial value. Humans always maintained that, we are more than just “intelligent”. But, we never asked where “Ideas” came from.

A commercially marketed whale song gives no Intellectual Property Rights to the Whale, only to the humans who convert the song into commercial value. The reality is that, Whales have a totally different brain segment that is absent in humans, and each whale song is unique.

We did this because, humans view the world only with “intelligence” and not with “consciousness”. Nothing is significant unless Intelligent. Science does not even consider the fact something that is not “intelligent” may be “conscious” such as whales Intelligence in the real world is just one mental state, a product of the conscious mind that emerges from the pre-frontal cortex of the human brain. While scientists get busy with observing what else forms of “intelligent behaviour” can emerge from Artificial Intelligence, there is not much going on in the field of Consciousness, Scientifically. Animals could be capable of exhibiting Higher Levels of Consciousness because, they have different mental states. But, there is no serious Scientific consideration of the possibility.

However, Human Ideas are not always the product of Intelligence. They are the products of Consciousness. Many successful inventors in history have attributed their ideas to have originated in dreams or visions or both. Common people get ideas about tasks when they are “showering or shaving”. When we put ourselves in a different mental state, our consciousness exhibits itself. An extreme example is that, Psychedlic drugs can induce a totally different mental state and Steve Jobs actively derived his ideas for Apple from such practices. Psychologists today often reiterate that the best human ideas are likely born when the human mind “wanders in boredom”. Psychologists and motivational speakers recommend spiritual practices as the best way to connect with Human Consciousness and produce ideas.

However, no scientific study has been able to establish the factual link between ideas and consciousness because, there is no scientific study on consciousness.

With the rise of the algorithms and the autonomous killer drones, it may be urgent for all of us to put some serious thought into the fact that, to secure a continual hold on intellectual property, we need to undertake study of the human psyche deeply and come up with an idea. The idea needs to recognizes “Consciousness Property” complete with a methodology for humans to explain their ideas from Consciousness and find a way to apply them as products or services. As of now, Magnus Carlsen cannot explain in clear terms as to why he makes some moves that are brilliant. Chess moves are not Intellectual Property. If Machines enter into all fields of life, then Machines will hold all the commercial value, the material world will be a stranger to humans. With consciousness property, Commercial value will flow from humans and not from machines.

Unless Humans can find a way to recognize consciousness property and a method to explain the origin of an idea in objective terms, even a genius like Magnus Carlsen will be unable to file an IP application. If you visualise such a scenario from geniuses to small business owners, the future will seem terrifying.

Humans may have a chance if humans take “conscious” action meaning, through consciousness.

See Linked File For List of Resources on the facts referred to in this article.

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