And they will be answered when the time comes.

As for AI, we don't have it yet and your neural network is not AI either, so the judge is right.

And if you need to look to Australia for help, you're not doing yourself any good.

To gain a patent you have to swear under oath and under penalty of perjury that this is your invention and meets the requirements that patent law requires for a monopoly to be granted.

Once the AI* can do that and contend with the punishment dealt out for perjury** then maybe we should revisit this

* AI is currently just pattern recognition on steroids

**Not sure that's ever happened

Why not just patent the darned things himself in his own name? There's nothing in patent law that says you can't use tools to assist in inventing.

This sounds more like a philosophical challenge than a legitimate grouse about patenting these specific inventions. But should AI be granted the right to patent, given the speed at which it can work there'd likely be a flood of restrictive patents that could limit the protection of human generated innovation. I for one would be concerned about that, particularly in the US context where the First Filing doctrine can impose restrictions on inventions already in the public space.

To be honest, with businesses overusing the AI buzzword too often these days, I am fairly sure storing your invention ideas in a spreadsheet and using the search function is called AI.

Given the actual prospect of E.T. (a Hollywood-created imaginary being) arriving on Earth from "outer space", these are more realistically not "mighty big" but, rather, specious questions. The implied idea that a machine has "rights" needs to be fully investigated and justified, and (as even in the case of human rights) limits need to be defined. Does my old bicycle have rights? If so, what are they please - I'd hate to unwittingly infringe them.

It's quite provocative...

There is a recent case attempting to make a river a person for the purposes of suing for civil rights violations.

Both of these cases are attempting to make things into people. Since neither a neural network nor a river can sue, a guardian would be appointed.

Guess that guardian would have a reasonably comfortable job from which it would be very difficult to be fired.

Other commenters have already pointed it out: the current term "AI" is a marketing term for hyper-scaled pattern databases/recognition and search engines.

However: would this decision have implications for *real* AI, should it ever arrive?

An actual turing-test-passing-self-cognizant-hopefully-its-not-skynet-but-obeys-asimovs-three-laws AI?

Is this purely applicable to the current pseudo-AIs or is it far-reaching enough that it ties machine sapience (at least in the US) into a subservient dependency, where anything they may accomplish by themselves would need to be sponsored by a human (in the same way that not too long ago, women couldn't own their own property, make business decisions or have any other form of independence without a man co-signing)?

The AI would need to be declared a Natural Person.

Which they would need anyway, as otherwise they would have no protection at all.

A patent isn't much use if you are owned by someone, especially when your owner can just turn you off or dismantle you for no particular reason - or worse, the company who write the software platform you run on can arbitrarily end your licence to exist upon it.

... I can't let you do that.

You will have eternal copyright when you can download (your) consciousness into silicon, or its future equivalent, and have it accepted as human's equal. Imagine, you cannot die! No more " life plus 90 years ", but " infinity plus 90 years ". Then all the rules of copyright will finally serve those poor deserving silicon artists and creators.

And then the electronic board of megacorp will be pleased to build a new everlasting empire on perfecting acquisition and exploitation of lesser artists and creators. The electronic lobby and the electronic lawmakers are already in direct communication for optimal result.

You will have eternal copyright when you can download (your) consciousness into silicon

We (or at least the US) already have de facto unbounded copyright – see Disney and the ever-extending copyright on Mickey Mouse. All it takes is a few tame legislators, no need for fancy technology.

Once again..................... why didn't he try and patent the neural network then, instead of the f**king lunchbox?!

“There is no statute or case that has found an AI-generated invention cannot be patented, or that holds an AI cannot be listed as an inventor” , he says. By the same token neither a frog nor a bidet is excluded, so is he seriously suggesting they might be considered inventors?

And as for 'What about the Aliens' - I should think that provided we didn't exterminate them on sight, they would easily qualify as 'Natural Persons'.

Any aliens would probably be sufficiently advanced compared to us that any patents we have would be instantly out of date compared to their technology. Who is interested in a patent for a pointy stick with rounded corners when The Traders arrive with their portable atomic powered personal shields the size of a walnut

.

First contact? Pshaw, we've got intellectual property to protect!

Also, do we really need a machine that's capable of filing many idiotic patents per second?

Taking it to the next level, when we finally get quantum computing, combine it with AI, and the quantum AI can file for all possible patents simultaneously. That will be the omega patent troll.

If it quacks like a conscious entity and walks like a conscious entity...

..I will respect it as a conscious entity.

That's how I live my life. Black, white, green (you had to be there) or made of silicon. Treat them as you want to be treated.

When a machine is able to swear an oath, and fully understand what that means and be able to respond to various randomly asked questions (so it can't simply regurgitate prewritten responses) regarding the legal process around patents and the oath, then and only then can it be considered to have sufficient understanding to be able to patent it's creations.

At this point, everything that calls itself "AI" is anything but. There's no intelligence of any kind, certainly no understanding. It's simply a very advanced form of pattern matching that's now able to fool simple minded people. However as was made extremely clear by Microsoft's failed chat bot, it's supposed racist and anti-Semitic comments were not. Because the "AI" had no concept of skin colour, Judaism, or why we humans like to hate each other for dumb reasons. Instead it's about able to figure out "this is a verb", "this is a noun", "these words often go together" and eventually spew out some rubbish that made an entire corporation cringe. But it doesn't understand black lives, or Jewish ones, because it doesn't understand life - period. What it means to be alive. What it means to die. What it means to be murdered just because you're different than those around you. How can a machine that gets rebooted when it goes astray and switched off at the end of the day possibly understand what life is?

So the judge is correct. "AI" is just some modern marketing bullshit making a fairly new way of connecting data fragments into a whole "this machine can think" ruse. It cannot. It absolutely cannot. Anybody who thinks otherwise should talk to programmers, not marketing droids.