Time To Fix Patents

The Economist on innovation: 

Patents are supposed to spread knowledge, by obliging holders to lay out their innovation for all to see; they often fail, because patent-lawyers are masters of obfuscation. Instead, the system has created a parasitic ecology of trolls and defensive patent-holders, who aim to block innovation, or at least to stand in its way unless they can grab a share of the spoils. An early study found that newcomers to the semiconductor business had to buy licences from incumbents for as much as $200m. Patents should spur bursts of innovation; instead, they are used to lock in incumbents’ advantages.

The patent system is expensive. A decade-old study reckons that in 2005, without the temporary monopoly patents bestow, America might have saved three-quarters of its $210 billion bill for prescription drugs. The expense would be worth it if patents brought innovation and prosperity. They don’t.

Teaching Machines to Understand Us→

The first time Yann LeCun revolutionized artificial intelligence, it was a false dawn. It was 1995, and for almost a decade, the young Frenchman had been dedicated to what many computer scientists considered a bad idea: that crudely mimicking certain features of the brain was the best way to bring about intelligent machines. But LeCun had shown that this approach could produce something strikingly smart—and useful. Working at Bell Labs, he made software that roughly simulated neurons and learned to read handwritten text by looking at many different examples. Bell Labs’ corporate parent, AT&T, used it to sell the first machines capable of reading the handwriting on checks and written forms. To LeCun and a few fellow believers in artificial neural networks, it seemed to mark the beginning of an era in which machines could learn many other skills previously limited to humans. It wasn’t.

That's how the fantastic featured story by Tom Simonite begins in the latest issue of MIT Technology Review. It is definitely worth the read. 

Stop Trying To Be Creative→

Christie Aschwanden for FiveThirtyEight Science: 

Most creative geniuses don’t start with a specific goal and follow it through with deliberate practice, said Scott Barry Kaufman, scientific director of the Imagination Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. Instead, they maintain an openness to discovering whatever arises.

Polite Robots Show Glimmer Of Self-Awareness

Popular Science: 

The robots were programed to think that two of them had been given a “dumbing pill” that would make them unable to speak (actually just a button that silenced them). However, they didn't know exactly which two of them had been silenced. When the robots were asked to answer which two had been given the pill, all of them tried to respond: “I don’t know.” Since only one was actually able to utter the words, it heard its own voice and recognized it wasn't among the two who had been silenced. That robot then responded: “Sorry, I know now. I was able to prove that I was not given a dumbing pill.”

On digital luxury and digital intimacy, Jony Ive and Marc Newson with Suzy Menkes

The Apple Watch is the first Apple product that has not enticed any kind of curiosity in me. I think it mostly has to do with the fact that I’ve not worn a watch in decades and don’t feel the need for one. Though I suspect at some point the functionality of the watch will lead me to get one, probably two versions down the road, when it is fine-tuned further. 

However, I am very curious about the conversation happening around the watch. A conversation about digital luxury and digital intimacy. Those two subjects now join the conversation around digital privacy and what it means to have technology so closely know what you are doing. 

The above video is Jonathan Ive and Marc Newson discussing those subjects with Suzy Menkes, International Vogue Editor.