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Comment by bediger4000 | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't your scheme point out contradictions in "intellectual property"? That is, a machine can churn out a discovery, demonstrating that the act of creation isn't special. And that undermines categories of justifications for IP.

The machines in question aren't motivated to create by a government granted monopoly on the fruits of their creation.

The act of creating the invention isn't special - a machine did it. No need to reward the machine for immense creativity or stunning inspiration.

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> No need to reward the machine for immense creativity or stunning inspiration

Patents don't award owners for their "stunning inspiration" or "immense creativity" it gives them a temporary monopoly so they can recoup their r&d costs when taking their invention to market, in exchange for the public disclosure of the invention.

> demonstrating that the act of creation isn't special. And that undermines categories of justifications for IP.

The purpose of patents is simply to encourage invention and discourage keeping inventions a secret. It's not premised on the "act of creation being special".

The way this is most likely to play out is that humans will use AI as tools to help them invent things, not that AI will invent things all by itself. So the premise and need for patents will remain intact.

If, however, AI somehow accomplishes the same goal as the patent system, then the patent system becomes unnecessary and will go away. As long as the goal is still being achieved, that's OK.

I thought the purpose was to make sure other don't benefit from your own hardwork.

That's the purpose of a patent. It's not the purpose of patents (as a system.)

That's not the purpose, that's the carrot the patent system gives in exchange for the invention being disclosed and ultimately (within a couple of decades) made available for general use.

The purpose of the patent system, really, is to benefit society, not inventors.

That's the putative reason for both parents and copyright. And I addressed that: the machine isn't motivated economically to increase the public domain.

The real reason is to own ideas, because people feel that creation is special. Takes hard work, or creativity or inspiration from the gods.

Machine generated ideas undermines all of that.

A machine can churn out plausible maybe-discoveries - things that may not be true, may not be workable, and may not be useful. Or, they may be all of the above. A huge mass of maybe-discoveries is actually not a very useful thing. Within it there are useful things, and (many more) useless things. Figuring out which is which is going to take a lot of work. Until someone puts in that work, the unfiltered spew of "ideas" is very close to noise.

There is no requirement that a patent actually work either. Nor is there a requirement that it has to have been implemented.

yeah, making the cost of researh, patentably discovery negligible could kill the whole patent industry, an enourmous bottleneck to application of research and lower compound effects of discovery built on precedent discoveries. Case in point E-ink technology, still extremely expensive due to corporate choices that favoured "milking" over "scaling".

> Case in point E-ink technology, still extremely expensive due to corporate choices that favoured "milking" over "scaling".

You say that with such confidence like as if it is a well proven fact. Care to share your evidence that it is not a simple case of a niche product with low volume?

Yes, that's an additional benefit.

Start with all existing patents and have an AI add "on a computer", "using AI", and "using a LLM" to each one. Also ask the AI to predict novel variations. Gather all that together and randomly sample and combine chunks and use the AI to make those random chunks into coherent ideas. Bake for 3 months and boom, you publish The Tome of 1 Trillion Novel Works of Prior Art: Volume 1.

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