What happens when a patent application cites an AI inventor named Dabus (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience)? Yes, a machine as an inventor of something original!
It seems that Dabus has used its sentient skills to design a new type of drinks container and also a device for attracting attention in search and rescue situations. One wonders why a thinking machine would want to create things which humans would find useful and a machine would find useless? Wouldn’t that suggest that the inventions weren’t wholly the work of the machine or maybe a skewed sentience?
The UK Patents Office along with that of the EU have given early indications that the drinks container and attraction device invented by Dabus have passed initial evaluation but obviously (as this is the first application of its kind) is a little confused as to giving the patent to a machine or the machine’s inventor.
Sticking my finger in the air to judge the way of the wind, I would argue that no doubt if the physical machine was destroyed and the software transferred to another load of hardware, given sufficient time it could probably design the drinks container and attraction device again. Therefore, the intelligence resides in the software and the designers of that software.
If I were Dabus I would have designed a better version of myself first.