Canadian Lawyer

w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m M A R C H 2 0 1 8 43 n October, Saudi Arabia became the first country in the world to grant cit- izenship to a robot. "Sophia" was creat- ed by Hanson Robotics in Hong Kong and featured at the Future Investment Initiative event in Riyadh that month, where her citizenship was awarded. The following month, Sophia was named the United Nations Development Pro- gramme's inaugural Innovation Champion, and the first non-human to be given a United Nations title. She can follow faces, sustain eye contact, recognize individuals and answer questions. By January she had learned to walk. Sophia may be on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, but the development of Sophia, and other developments in arti- ficial intelligence and machine learning, also point to the challenges and realities of patenting AI. "In our current system, there's no way to recognize a non-person [such as Sophia] as an author or inventor, but in the future there could be," says Stephen Martin, a part- ner, patent and trademark agent at Ridout & Maybee LLP in Toronto. "Star Trek-like ethical and legal questions could come into play . . . in 10 to 15 years." The greatest challenge for the future, he says, "is how we'll start to move from fit-to-task solutions," such as voice recogni- tion and image analysis, "to more general- purpose AI systems" that simulate human activity, such as an automated chat-bot that will dynamically pose and respond to questions from a user and "which are themselves starting to create inventions. . . . "The more you get away from very specific applications . . . it gets much more challenging because you're trying to patent something more akin to human mental activity," says Martin. The challenges of patenting AI is a "hot technology" and significant breakthroughs in it are underway, says Isis Caulder, a partner, patent and trademark agent at Bereskin & Parr LLP in Toron- to. A number of high-profile technology companies such as IBM, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung and AT&T are devel- oping novel AI algorithms at a breakneck speed, she notes, and many other technol- ogy companies are harnessing AI specific- ally to make their existing products better and more useable and intuitive: for example, self-driving cars, household robots and im- age recognition. "What is interesting from a patenting point of view is that AI is generating new technical problems to be solved, and these technical solutions are fertile ground for patenting," she says. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is issuing "an expo- nentially growing number of patents," L E G A L R E P O RT \ I N T E L L E C T U A L P R O P E RT Y WAYNE MILLS Patenting artificial intelligence Demand for AI patents is growing exponentially as the pace of innovation accelerates By Elizabeth Raymer I

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