TagInvention
Why We Need to Stop Relying On Patents to Measure Innovation
The key to a nation's long-run economic growth is the effect of innovation on productivity, and has little to do with patent activityPatent databases may be a smoke screen that hides the true issues, problems, and dynamics of innovation behind the illusion that innovation is booming—and that patent activity measures the boom. We are said to live in a time of remarkable innovation, with the computer/information revolution often compared to the Industrial Revolution in allowing people to produce more while working less. Economists, consultants, and other business gurus are striving mightily to quantify this revolution and to understand its sources and implications. One popular metric is the number of new patents issued each year. For example, the pace of innovation might be gauged by the fact that there were 669,434 US patent applications and 390,499 new patents awarded in 2019, each triple the Read More ›
To What Extent Does Life Simply Invent Itself As It Goes Along?
The evidence may surprise usAccording to a popular anti-creationist website Talk Origins, one of the strongest pieces of evidence for evolution and common descent is the phylogenetic signal. In their view, when we look at specific properties across multiple species — number of legs, presence or absence of wings, the presence of a gene, a configuration of nucleotides in the genome, etc. — such properties will form a strongly nested hierarchy. We should expect to see such a strongly nested hierarchy if organisms evolved from one another and therefore a “family tree” links all the organisms together. However, if a property that appears only on a branch, it will be shared only by that branch’s leaves. Leaves on a different branch will not have Read More ›
Ruling: AIs Can’t Hold Patents
The US Patent Office has ruled that only "natural persons" can own patents, not machinesAn issue left untouched is whether AI can, in principle, be creative in any event. There is no real evidence for that. The big worry, perhaps, is not being replaced by one’s tools but being ruled by them.
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