Sylvain Peyronnet works at IX-Labs, the private research laboratory he founded to help people and institutions make informed decisions in the digital domain. The laboratory is particularly renowned for its expertise in the design of algorithms for data analysis and decision-making.
We had the pleasure of asking Sylvain a few questions about Artificial Intelligence, which is currently being debated at European level.
The European Commission is planning to give robots legal responsibility. Can Artificial Intelligence really invent?
This is a vast question. Originally, in the program of the 1956 Dartmouth symposium, this notion appeared as one of the aims of Artificial Intelligence (under the poetic title of “randomness and creativity”). Secondly, the very question of what constitutes an invention or a work of the mind has always been a difficult one: when a great master painter had a whole workshop of little hands helping him to do the rough work on his paintings, who was the author? Always the great master. Is Artificial Intelligence any different? From a philosophical point of view, I don’t think so, and from a technical point of view, Artificial Intelligence certainly creates novelty, but following a methodology that is still rather fixed.
What has changed very recently is that several new methods have been developed to “transfer” features from training data to new data. We’re seeing the emergence of filters for photographs that will transform a photo into an impressionist painting, or a work “à la Klee”, or so on. Is it really an “autonomous” invention when a filter on my cell phone turns a photo of my kitchen into a pseudo-impressionist painting? It’s doubtful, even if the result can be original and aesthetically pleasing.
With home automation, autonomous vehicles, and increasingly powerful voice control, do you think we’re living in the future fantasized by fiction?
We’re still a long way from that future. Home automation is still in its infancy, and the demands made on autonomous vehicles (to drive better than the best humans) are still largely out of reach. That said, we are approaching a certain vision of the future with voice assistants that enable certain tasks to be carried out “hands-free”.
It’s always interesting to see the co-evolution between fiction and reality: when computer technology was still in its infancy, fiction offered us highly visible “devices” (big computers, machine rooms, etc.), whereas now we’re offered a future where technology is invisible, but omnipresent. In this respect, works of fiction such as the recent Netflix film “Anon” or the Artificial Intelligence series “Person of Interest” are highly representative.
Today, our society seems to fantasize a future where technology assists us 24 hours a day, like a silent, invisible servant.
Do we need Artificial Intelligence to be better than humans, and to invent?
That’s a big question, and I’ll answer no without too much hesitation. We don’t “need” it now, but perhaps we’ll create that need one day soon. But for the moment, Artificial Intelligence does nothing better than humans; on the contrary, most Artificial Intelligence techniques are limited to mimicking what humans can do, faster, more tenaciously and more “amplified”: what the best human can do from time to time in a few seconds, Artificial Intelligence often aims to do all the time and faster.When we talk about invention, we mustn’t forget that an invention is rarely the product of a single brain: it’s often the collective that makes an invention emerge (even if it’s often attributed to a single person) and from this point of view, we don’t yet have collaborative Artificial Intelligence 😉
A word from the IP expert :
Today, an invention can be the property of a legal entity or a natural person, but the inventor must be a natural person. For example, a company may own a patent, but only one of its employees may be the inventor (see our article on the rules governing employee inventions).
The European Commission’s project raises real questions, not least in terms of industrial property law.
As the number of patents filed for inventions made by AI is growing, it’s important to start thinking today about the status of an Artificial Intelligence as an inventor, as well as the ownership of patents resulting from it.
