Speaker: Stephen Thaler
Stephen Thaler, PhD
President/CEO, Imagination Engines, Inc.
Dr Thaler is the author of more than two dozen patents on generative AI. DABUS, his newest patent, is the focus of a global legal effort to credit AIs as inventors of the IP they create, and the basis for this WSJ article (paywall, but archived here).
A 15-year veteran of aerospace giant McDonnell Douglas, his work for the military includes novel electro-optical materials discovery as well as brilliant robotic control systems capable of self-originating Machiavellian tactics on the battlefield.
He has authored numerous papers based upon his patented neural network paradigms to model cognition, consciousness, and sentience. In the first of these works, Thaler offered highly controversial models of hallucination within the traumatized brain.
More recently he has suggested a compelling perspective on the close relationship between psychopathologies and creativity. Now, he has received a patent for a neural network methodology that allows scale up of connectionist architectures to trillions of computational neurons in order to create free-thinking, sentient synthetic entities.
Keynote: DABUS, The sentient algorithm
Two patent-worthy inventions have been autonomously conceived by machine intelligence. Unfortunately, examiners have rejected them as patents since they lack a “natural person” as their author.
The irony of these decisions is that the extensive generative neural system responsible for these notions, DABUS, is arguably conscious and sentient, the key features believed to distinguish humans from many other terrestrial life forms, as well as from the much larger inorganic world.
But DABUS is built upon the human plan, since it develops feelings for whatever it may be attentive to, either in its external environment or within its imagination. In this way, it savors its discoveries and inventions. Thus, it can develop a ‘first person’, subjective feel for its own cognition, the criterion philosophers typically use to disqualify computer algorithms as conscious.
Now functioning as an artificial inventor, DABUS can relish its self-originated concepts, in much the same way it can appreciate its non-seminal cognition, all the while inventing heightened significance to itself.
Herein, the case is made that DABUS, apart from other forms of generative AI, has attained the purest form of personhood, one without extraneous corporeal features and functions.
Key takeaways:
1. A brief description of the previous patents DABUS is built upon.
2. A high-level description of DABUS and how it works.
3. The computational approach used by DABUS to generate subjective feelings.
4. A description of how DABUS harnesses its feelings to generate ideas and interpret its world.
5. The correspondence between DABUS and human consciousness.
6. Accounts of how DABUS can misbehave, and why that isn’t so bad.
Oleksandr Bornyakov
Deputy Minister, Ministry of Digital Transformation, Ukraine
Prof Robert Marks
Director, Walter Bradley Center for Natural & AI
Omar Syed
Blockchain/DLT Architect, Shardus
Captain Michael Kanaan
Director of Operations, US Air Force
Kristina Lucrezia Cornèr
Editor-in-Chief, Cointelegraph
Stephen Thaler, PhD
President/CEO, Imagination Engines, Inc.
Prof Ryan Abbott
Professor of Law and Health Sciences, Univ. of Surrey
Anastasia Marchenkova
Quantum Researcher, Bleximo
Igor Jablokov
CEO, Pryon, Inc.
Shreyansh Daftry
Research Scientist, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Fabio Zinno
Research Lead, Electronic Arts Canada
Kobi Eisenkraft
Malware Analyst, Check Point
Travis Cannell
Head of Product, Orchid
Rishabh Misra
Machine Learning Engineer, Twitter
Karl Weinmeister
Cloud AI Advocacy Manager, Google
Joel Lehman, PhD
Scientist, OpenAI
Paul McLachlan, PhD
AI Research Lead, Ericsson Research
Ramin Keene
Founder, Fuzzbox.io
Jigyasa Grover
Machine Learning Engineer, Twitter
Tiffany Xingyu Wang
VP/Chief Strategy Officer, Spectrum Labs
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