Quite correct. Among other courts, I’m admitted to practice before the U.S. District and Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — though I’ve retired from practicing law and am on inactive status these days. Moreover, I used to teach communications law, which of course includes copyright. I find it fascinating to watch the courts grapple with the intellectual property aspects of AI. I am enjoying this running discussion from the point of view of we writers.
As an undergrad in the late seventies, I wrote a paper postulating the use of quantum bits as a basis for a computing device that could leverage superposition to solve super complex problems. (My professor thought it was an idea bordering on fiction, though only a few years later this idea emerged as a genuine field of inquiry. Ha!)
Later, I was fascinated, purely as an amateur because I was now a lawyer, to follow the research into machines that can mimic human intelligence. I remember idly making notes (now in the eighties) about combining quantum mechanics with layered nodes to mimic neurons (an idea I had read about), but with the capacity to consider all neural pathways simultaneously (an idea that I had). This thought so frightened me that I have had a hard time enjoying the idea of AI ever since. Imagine a thinking machine that can consider all possibilities at once, while we humans are limited to linear neural pathways. If we think AI is too disruptive now, well, we haven’t seen anything yet. When the bastards finally figure out how to combine quantum computing with classical AI (it’s funny calling AI classical, but that’s what it is), we are really screwed as living, thinking beings. And I’m an optimist by nature.