Automating Invention?

Invention, a human creative process, is often thought of as a problem for strong artificial Intelligence (AI), and is therefore more elusive in practice. An article in The Futurist [1]  magazine by Robert Plotkin considers the approach of computer programs that can take specific product requirements from humans, and in turn produce an optimized product design, as a result of an AI invention process.

While the benefits of this new technology seem very promising, the author also points out that considerable compute power, existing human subject matter expert knowledge, and skilled human operators are still needed to make this approach work, for now. Plotkin, an attorney specializing in high technology patent law, also brings the point of who owns the design from such AI-produced systems.

If in the near future these types of systems become prevalent, could they not make human programmers and designers, etc. obsolete? Could these same systems be used to make a better cyber-criminal? (faster and more prevalent day zero attacks) So, impacts in legal, moral, ethical, and social areas will be a result of this looming future of AI-inspired invention and creation.

Ref:
[1] Plotkin, R. (2009). The automation of invention: cybernetic genies are designing and engineering new products and creating technological breakthroughs. THE FUTURIST    July-August 2009, 22-27.

To obtain a copy of the article by Robert Plotkin

SO, an interesting Web tool that caught my attention is YOTIFY, (first part of name pronounced like Yoda, from Star Wars) at yotigy.com. The YouTube demo is provided below.

Have you ever wanted a bot to crawl the web to find something you wanted more info on, but you did not want to do the programming or spend too much time to pull it off? Well, this could be the cool tool for you. Yotify is easy to configure and use. Select the search category and keywords to create a scout (bot), and then turn it loose. It will send you feedback either hourly or daily, as a digest of results to your email account. This can be great for more than just e-shopping. I have set it up to scan for articles in artificial intelligence, which relates to my research project. I will let you know how it fares after several days activity.

This could be the next best thing to having an army of minions.

Things to come, maybe... - A few thoughts on the 2010 Horizon Report

Mission: "Discuss one technology and one key trend from the Horizon Report 2010." (as per Dr. Calongne)

After reviewing the table of contents of the Horizon Report 2010 for any technology that might appear personally interesting, the subject of Augmented Reality caught my interest, as it aligns with my area of research, which is personalized artificial intelligence. The article examined mainly how a few organizations are delivering real-time content as a visual overlay for example, via camera-capable cell phones, which know your location and what you have in the view of the cell phone camera. Other uses and delivery technologies are discussed as well. I could see this as being expanded to the extent of Wikipedia, such that we may have access to point delivery of knowledge about whatever we are looking at, in the moment, as though we were in a virtual museum.

A capability such as briefly described above would also help to deliver one of the key trends described in the Horizon Report 2010: "People  expect  to  be  able  to  work,  learn,  and
study whenever and wherever they want to." I would expect that the advancement of augmented reality would well serve the goal anytime learning. However, we may well find that we need more reliable and immediate technology access, which could lead us to choose a more Borg-like arrangement with technology.

International Organized Crime and it's Impact.


http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/misha_glenny_investigates_global_crime_networks.html


A very Taoist situation: bright future and dark future seem to advance in balance with one another.
Are we getting further away from Utopia everyday? (Like we could even agree on what Utopia would be.) I suspect that our crime is increasing in line with our global population (consumers/victums), and it would be interesting to know if there is a recent study to validate or invalidate this hunch.It appears that crime is doing as well as it ever has done, and knows how to find it's own silver lining with every major shift in human events and technology.