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A sustained increase in court caseload often means that are needed to hear the cases, which results in a need for more courtrooms. For courts that are already fully-staffed, the only solution is an expansion to the current building or a brand new courthouse – options that don’t relieve the short-term space need and that are often difficult or impossible in jurisdictions with tight budgets.

Instead of tolerating a burdensome caseload and overloading judges and staff, many courts find ways to increase their operational efficiencies. One of these strategies is the use of differentiated case management, which can be a very effective tool to increase courtroom utilization.

Still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, court systems in many states are working to clear their case backlogs.

Some court systems have moved cases faster using virtual court proceedings, court data dashboards and online jury selection. In other states, lawmakers are stepping in.

*Problematic language edited in brackets; PAGI = Powerful Artificial General Intelligence

If the human brain lacks supernatural components such as a soul, then it is just a machine. But it is a mere three-pound machine that must fit inside of a human skull, be powered by relatively tiny amounts of energy, and be made entirely of biological materials. Engineers, who do not face any of these constrains when building their computers, should be able to eventually construct much more powerful machines than the human brain since these engineers should eventually be able to do everything that nature does plus much more. Furthermore, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that evolution just happened to hit upon the smartest possible minds when it formed the brains of Einstein, von Neumann, and Newton, especially given the constrains that evolution faced. If our high technology civilization survives long enough, it will someday likely be capable of making machines much smarter than any human who has ever existed.

[ FIGURE 1 OMITTED ] The video (Figure 1) shows a simple model of hosts and pathogens we have used to study evolutionary dynamics. In the animation, the green are hosts and red are pathogens. As pathogens infect hosts, they spread across the system. If you look closely, you will see that the red changes tint from time to time — that is the natural mutation of pathogens to become more or less aggressive. Watch as one of the more aggressive—brighter red — strains rapidly expands. After a time it goes extinct leaving a black region. Why does it go extinct? The answer is that it spreads so rapidly that it kills the hosts around it. Without new hosts to infect it then dies out itself. That the rapidly spreading pathogens die out has important implications for evolutionary research which we have talked about elsewhere [1–7]. In the research I want to discuss here, what we were interested in is the effect of adding long range transportation [8]. This includes natural means of dispersal as well as unintentional dispersal by humans, like adding airplane routes, which is being done by real world airlines (Figure 2). [ FIGURE 2 OMITTED ] When we introduce long range transportation into the model, the success of more aggressive strains changes. They can use the long range transportation to find new hosts and escape local extinction. Figure 3 shows that the more transportation routes introduced into the model, the more higher aggressive pathogens are able to survive and spread. [ FIGURE 3 OMITTED ] As we add more long range transportation, there is a critical point at which pathogens become so aggressive that the entire host population dies. The pathogens die at the same time, but that is not exactly a consolation to the hosts. We call this the phase transition to extinction (Figure 4). With increasing levels of global transportation, human civilization may be approaching such a critical threshold. Figure 4: The probability of survival makes a sharp transition (red line) from one to zero as we add more long range transportaion (horizontal axis). The right line (black) holds for different model parameters, so we need to study at what point the transition will take place for our world. In the paper we wrote in 2006 about the dangers of global transportation for pathogen evolution and pandemics [8], we mentioned the risk from Ebola. Ebola is a horrendous disease that was present only in isolated villages in Africa. It was far away from the rest of the world only because of that isolation. Since Africa was developing, it was only a matter of time before it reached population centers and airports. While the model is about evolution, it is really about which pathogens will be found in a system that is highly connected, and Ebola can spread in a highly connected world. The traditional approach to public health uses historical evidence analyzed statistically to assess the potential impacts of a disease. As a result, many were surprised by the spread of Ebola through West Africa in 2014. As the connectivity of the world increases, past experience is not a good guide to future events. A key point about the phase transition to extinction is its suddenness. Even a system that seems stable, can be destabilized by a few more long-range connections, and connectivity is continuing to increase. So how close are we to the tipping point? We don’t know but it would be good to find out before it happens. While Ebola ravaged three countries in West Africa, it only resulted in a handful of cases outside that region. One possible reason is that many of the airlines that fly to west Africa stopped or reduced flights during the epidemic [9]. In the absence of a clear connection, public health authorities who downplayed the dangers of the epidemic spreading to the West might seem to be vindicated. As with the choice of airlines to stop flying to west Africa, our analysis didn’t take into consideration how people respond to epidemics. It does tell us what the outcome will be unless we respond fast enough and well enough to stop the spread of future diseases, which may not be the same as the ones we saw in the past. As the world becomes more connected, the dangers increase. Are people in western countries safe because of higher quality health systems? Countries like the U.S. have highly skewed networks of social interactions with some very highly connected individuals that can be “superspreaders.” The chances of such an individual becoming infected may be low but events like a mass outbreak pose a much greater risk if they do happen. If a sick food service worker in an airport infects 100 passengers, or a contagion event happens in mass transportation, an outbreak could very well prove unstoppable. Watch this mock video of a pathogen spreading globally through land and air transportation. Long range transportation will continue to pose a threat of pandemic if its impacts cannot be contained.

In such a near future, my fellow experts would no longer talk of “democratic erosion.” We would be spiraling downward into a time of democratic despair, recalling Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s grim observation from the 1970s that liberal democracy “is where the world was, not where it is going.” 5 The world pulled out of that downward spiral—but it took new, more purposeful American leadership. The planet was not so lucky in the 1930s, when the global implosion of democracy led to a catastrophic world war, between a rising axis of emboldened dictatorships and a shaken and economically depressed collection of self-doubting democracies. These are the stakes. Expanding democracy—with its liberal norms and constitutional commitments—is a crucial foundation for world peace and security. Knock that away, and our most basic hopes and assumptions will be imperiled. The problem is not just that the ground is slipping. It is that we are perched on a global precipice. That ledge has been gradually giving way for a decade. If the erosion continues, we may well reach a tipping point where democracy goes bankrupt suddenly—plunging the world into depths of oppression and aggression that we have not seen since the end of World War II. As a political scientist, I know that our theories and tools are not nearly good enough to tell us just how close we are getting to that point—until it happens.

Climate changes are already affecting US water resources, and the consequences for communities, health, and the environment will worsen

The science is unambiguous, as shown in the long series of US National Climate Assessments, reports from the US National Academies of Science, and other national and international scientific reviews (US Global Change Research Program 2020). Rising temperatures affect both water supply and demand. Rapidly melting snow and ice mean floods in spring, droughts in summer, and new threats to hydropower production. Rising sea levels threaten coastal communities, groundwater, and wetlands.

A world dominated by totalitarian states would be more incompetent, more war-prone, less cooperative, and more inhibitive of progress than one dominated by democratic states. Our current world is not particularly competent, peaceful, cooperative, or progressive—a totalitarian-dominated world would be worse. It would increase the risk of another collapse and extinction and could shape the future toward less desirable trajectories (Beckstead, 2013).

Totalitarian states are incompetent. They are bad at forecasting and dealing with disasters (Caplan, 2008).16 This can be seen most clearly in the great famines of Communist China and the USSR, in which millions died (Applebaum, 2017; Becker, 1996; Dikotter, 2010; Snyder, 2010). In comparison, functioning multiparty democracies rarely, if ever, experience famines (Sen, 2010). “Established autocracies” (or “personal”/“sultanist”) are particularly bad, as there are few checks or restraints on arbitrary rule and the whims and ideology of the single individual, even from other elites (Svolik, 2012). From the inside, the “inner circle” around Mao, Stalin, and Hitler seems incredibly chaotic, with elites strongly incentivized to conceal information and encouraged by the autocrat to squabble and feud—so they are divided (Conquest, 1992; Kershaw, 2008; Zhang & Halliday, 2006). If totalitarian states are worse at addressing social, environmental, and technological problems, then a world dominated by them would likely be worse at responding to risks of collapse and extinction.

Several epidemics, such as the Black Death and the Spanish flu, have threatened human life throughout history; however, it is unclear if humans will remain safe from the sudden and fast spread of epidemic diseases. Moreover, the transmission characteristics of epidemics remain undiscovered. In this study, we present the results of an epidemic simulation experiment revealing the relationship between epidemic parameters and pandemic risk. To analyze the time-dependent risk and impact of epidemics, we considered two parameters for infectious diseases: the recovery time from infection and the transmission rate of the disease. Based on the epidemic simulation, we identified two important aspects of human safety with regard to the threat of a pandemic. First, humans should be safe if the fatality rate is below 100%. Second, even when the fatality rate is 100%, humans would be safe if the average degree of human social networks is below a threshold value. Nevertheless, certain diseases can potentially infect all nodes in the human social networks, and these diseases cause a pandemic when the average degree is larger than the threshold value. These results indicated that certain infectious diseases lead to human extinction and can be prevented by minimizing human contact.

1. Introduction

Climate change could lead to “global catastrophes” up to and including human extinction, a new study has found.

And scientists and policymakers are making it more likely by failing to face the possibility head-on, according to the study, published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The spread of nuclear weapons poses at least six severe threats to international peace and security including: nuclear war, nuclear terrorism, global and regional instability, constrained US freedom of action, weakened alliances, and further nuclear proliferation. Each of these threats has received extensive treatment elsewhere and this review is not intended to replicate or even necessarily to improve upon these previous efforts. Rather the goals of this section are more modest: to usefully bring together and recap the many reasons why we should be pessimistic about the likely consequences of nuclear proliferation. Many of these threats will be illuminated with a discussion of a case of much contemporary concern: Iran’s advanced nuclear program. Nuclear War The greatest threat posed by the spread of nuclear weapons is nuclear war. The more states in possession of nuclear weapons, the greater the probability that somewhere, someday, there will be a catastrophic nuclear war. To date, nuclear weapons have only been used in warfare once. In 1945, the United States used nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing World War II to a close. Many analysts point to the 65-plus-year tradition of nuclear non-use as evidence that nuclear weapons are unusable, but it would be naïve to think that nuclear weapons will never be used again simply because they have not been used for some time. After all, analysts in the 1990s argued that worldwide economic downturns like the Great Depression were a thing of the past, only to be surprised by the dot-com bubble bursting later in the decade and the Great Recession of the late 2000s.48 This author, for one, would be surprised if nuclear weapons are not used again sometime in his lifetime. Before reaching a state of MAD, new nuclear states go through a transition period in which they lack a secure-second strike capability. In this context, one or both states might believe that it has an incentive to use nuclear weapons first. For example, if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, neither Iran, nor its nuclear-armed rival, Israel, will have a secure, second-strike capability. Even though it is believed to have a large arsenal, given its small size and lack of strategic depth, Israel might not be confident that it could absorb a nuclear strike and respond with a devastating counterstrike. Similarly, Iran might eventually be able to build a large and survivable nuclear arsenal, but, when it first crosses the nuclear threshold, Tehran will have a small and vulnerable nuclear force. In these pre-MAD situations, there are at least three ways that nuclear war could occur. First, the state with the nuclear advantage might believe it has a splendid first strike capability. In a crisis, Israel might, therefore, decide to launch a preventive nuclear strike to disarm Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Indeed, this incentive might be further increased by Israel’s aggressive strategic culture that emphasizes preemptive action. Second, the state with a small and vulnerable nuclear arsenal, in this case Iran, might feel use them or lose them pressures. That is, in a crisis, Iran might decide to strike first rather than risk having its entire nuclear arsenal destroyed. Third, as Thomas Schelling has argued, nuclear war could result due to the reciprocal fear of surprise attack.49 If there are advantages to striking first, one state might start a nuclear war in the belief that war is inevitable and that it would be better to go first than to go second. Fortunately, there is no historic evidence of this dynamic occurring in a nuclear context, but it is still possible. In an Israeli–Iranian crisis, for example, Israel and Iran might both prefer to avoid a nuclear war, but decide to strike first rather than suffer a devastating first attack from an opponent. Even in a world of MAD, however, when both sides have secure, second-strike capabilities, there is still a risk of nuclear war. Rational deterrence theory assumes nuclear-armed states are governed by rational leaders who would not intentionally launch a suicidal nuclear war. This assumption appears to have applied to past and current nuclear powers, but there is no guarantee that it will continue to hold in the future. Iran’s theocratic government, despite its inflammatory rhetoric, has followed a fairly pragmatic foreign policy since 1979, but it contains leaders who hold millenarian religious worldviews and could one day ascend to power. We cannot rule out the possibility that, as nuclear weapons continue to spread, some leader somewhere will choose to launch a nuclear war, knowing full well that it could result in self-destruction. One does not need to resort to irrationality, however, to imagine nuclear war under MAD. Nuclear weapons may deter leaders from intentionally launching full-scale wars, but they do not mean the end of international politics. As was discussed above, nuclear-armed states still have conflicts of interest and leaders still seek to coerce nuclear-armed adversaries. Leaders might, therefore, choose to launch a limited nuclear war.50 This strategy might be especially attractive to states in a position of conventional inferiority that might have an incentive to escalate a crisis quickly to the nuclear level. During the Cold War, the United States planned to use nuclear weapons first to stop a Soviet invasion of Western Europe given NATO’s conventional inferiority.51 As Russia’s conventional power has deteriorated since the end of the Cold War, Moscow has come to rely more heavily on nuclear weapons in its military doctrine. Indeed, Russian strategy calls for the use of nuclear weapons early in a conflict (something that most Western strategists would consider to be escalatory) as a way to de-escalate a crisis. Similarly, Pakistan’s military plans for nuclear use in the event of an invasion from conventionally stronger India. And finally, Chinese generals openly talk about the possibility of nuclear use against a US superpower in a possible East Asia contingency. Second, as was also discussed above, leaders can make a ‘threat that leaves something to chance’.52 They can initiate a nuclear crisis. By playing these risky games of nuclear brinkmanship, states can increase the risk of nuclear war in an attempt to force a less resolved adversary to back down. Historical crises have not resulted in nuclear war, but many of them, including the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, have come close. And scholars have documented historical incidents when accidents nearly led to war.53 When we think about future nuclear crisis dyads, such as Iran and Israel, with fewer sources of stability than existed during the Cold War, we can see that there is a real risk that a future crisis could result in a devastating nuclear exchange. Nuclear Terrorism The spread of nuclear weapons also increases the risk of nuclear terrorism.54 While September 11th was one of the greatest tragedies in American history, it would have been much worse had Osama Bin Laden possessed nuclear weapons. Bin Laden declared it a ‘religious duty’ for Al- Qa’eda to acquire nuclear weapons and radical clerics have issued fatwas declaring it permissible to use nuclear weapons in Jihad against the West.55 Unlike states, which can be more easily deterred, there is little doubt that if terrorists acquired nuclear weapons, they would use them.56 Indeed, in recent years, many US politicians and security analysts have argued that nuclear terrorism poses the greatest threat to US national security.57 Analysts have pointed out the tremendous hurdles that terrorists would have to overcome in order to acquire nuclear weapons.58 Nevertheless, as nuclear weapons spread, the possibility that they will eventually fall into terrorist hands increases. States could intentionally transfer nuclear weapons, or the fissile material required to build them, to terrorist groups. There are good reasons why a state might be reluctant to transfer nuclear weapons to terrorists, but, as nuclear weapons spread, the probability that a leader might someday purposely arm a terrorist group increases. Some fear, for example, that Iran, with its close ties to Hamas and Hizballah, might be at a heightened risk of transferring nuclear weapons to terrorists. Moreover, even if no state would ever intentionally transfer nuclear capabilities to terrorists, a new nuclear state, with underdeveloped security procedures, might be vulnerable to theft, allowing terrorist groups or corrupt or ideologically-motivated insiders to transfer dangerous material to terrorists. There is evidence, for example, that representatives from Pakistan’s atomic energy establishment met with Al-Qa’eda members to discuss a possible nuclear deal.59 Finally, a nuclear-armed state could collapse, resulting in a breakdown of law and order and a loose nukes problem. US officials are currently very concerned about what would happen to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons if the government were to fall. As nuclear weapons spread, this problem is only further amplified. Iran is a country with a history of revolutions and a government with a tenuous hold on power. The regime change that Washington has long dreamed about in Tehran could actually become a nightmare if a nuclear-armed Iran suffered a breakdown in authority, forcing us to worry about the fate of Iran’s nuclear arsenal. Regional Instability The spread of nuclear weapons also emboldens nuclear powers, contributing to regional instability. States that lack nuclear weapons need to fear direct military attack from other states, but states with nuclear weapons can be confident that they can deter an intentional military attack, giving them an incentive to be more aggressive in the conduct of their foreign policy. In this way, nuclear weapons provide a shield under which states can feel free to engage in lower-level aggression. Indeed, international relations theories about the ‘stability-instability paradox’ maintain that stability at the nuclear level contributes to conventional instability.60 Historically, we have seen that the spread of nuclear weapons has emboldened their possessors and contributed to regional instability. Recent scholarly analyses have demonstrated that, after controlling for other relevant factors, nuclear-weapon states are more likely to engage in conflict than nonnuclear-weapon states and that this aggressiveness is more pronounced in new nuclear states that have less experience with nuclear diplomacy.61 Similarly, research on internal decision-making in Pakistan reveals that Pakistani foreign policymakers may have been emboldened by the acquisition of nuclear weapons, which encouraged them to initiate militarized disputes against India.62 Currently, Iran restrains its foreign policy because it fears major military retaliation from the United States or Israel, but with nuclear weapons it could feel free to push harder. A nuclear-armed Iran would likely step up support to terrorist and proxy groups and engage in more aggressive coercive diplomacy. With a nuclear-armed Iran increasingly throwing its weight around in the region, we could witness an even more crisis prone Middle East. And in a poly-nuclear Middle East with Israel, Iran, and, in the future, possibly other states, armed with nuclear weapons, any one of those crises could result in a catastrophic nuclear exchange.

These heavy workloads can take a toll on judges; in four districts, interviewees explicitly raised the concern of burn-out due to the burdens of compensating for long-term vacancies (E.D. Cal., S.D. Fla., D. Nev., E.D. Tex.).59 Chief Judge Davis in the Eastern District of Texas, for example, described the “long-term tolling effect on the judges” from his district’s two vacancies, citing an impact on “morale.”60 He added, “I sense a weariness and a tiredness on behalf of our district judges, especially ones that have to travel long distances [because of vacancies].”61 Judge Davis speculated that this long-term toll was encouraging judges in his district to retire, noting that the number of senior judges in his district has declined as more judges chose to leave the bench altogether when they reached retirement age.62 Chief Judge Federico Moreno in the Southern District of Florida likewise highlighted the toll that vacancies in his district placed on judges, despite observing that he did not think the vacancies were impacting the administration of justice.63 “It’s like an emergency room in a hospital,” he observed. “The judges are used to it and people come in and out and get good treatment. But the question is, can you sustain it? Eventually you burn out.”64

In two districts, interviewees also highlighted the burdens on senior judges who had retired from active service while continuing to carry full or close-to-full caseloads,65 arguing that it “wears [them] down.”66 The Clerk of Court in the Western District of Wisconsin commended the district’s senior judge as “working as hard or harder than before she retired.”67

In the most direct mechanism, courts foreclose a particular cause of action, effectively withdrawing all judicial resources from that category of litigation so that they can be reserved for other, "more important" cases. This occurs, for instance, when courts embrace the "floodgates" argument, the idea that

certain sorts of law suits should not be allowed because to do so would 'swamp' the courts with litigation. The court supposes that if it were to allow that type of suit it would lack the time to consider promptly enough other law suits aiming to vindicate rights that are, taken together, more important than the rights it therefore proposes to bar.

Court “, https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1309&context=iplr published 2017, accessed 6-11-2024]

The third factor of concern is the amount of time it takes to process a copyright infringement claim in the federal courts. A civil case that goes through the federal court system has a median time of twenty-five months.139 The foremost of the factors causing this delay is case backlog.140 Currently, in the US federal court system, there is a backlog of more than 340,000 pending civil cases.141 Additionally, this number does not reflect that the federal courts must attempt to resolve criminal matters before they address civil ones in circumstances where it is reasonable to do so, and the number of backlogged criminal cases is over 80,000.142 While the nature of criminal cases can make the delay seem justifiable, it does not change the fact that copyright gets put on a backburner and “if decisions on contracts, mergers and intellectual-property rights can’t be reached through quick and prompt justice, things unravel for business.”143 This kind of time investment is not feasible for the average individual or amateur creator.144 Judge Lawrence J. O’Neill spoke on this issue stating “[o]ver the years I’ve received several letters from people indicating, ‘Even if I win this case now, my business has failed because of the delay. How is this justice?’ And the simple answer, which I cannot give them, is this: It is not justice. We know it.”145

Not only can federal litigation be costly, but it can also be lengthy given the backlog of cases in the federal court system. In 2019 alone, there were 376,762 filings in U.S. District Courts and 47,977 filings in the twelve regional Courts of Appeals. 70 Having the federal courts be the only arena for copyright infringement cases adds to this backlog and could potentially cause the parties in the case to have to wait long periods of time before their trial.

B. INCONSISTENT RULINGS

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s decision in Roche

Products v. Bolar Pharmaceutical Co. only exacerbated the issues plaguing generic market entry. 30 Prior to Roche, generic companies would conduct experiments with brand-name drugs before the brand’s patent term expired in order to gather data for application to the FDA.31 However, the Court in Roche refused to expand the “experimental use” defense and held that a generic company would infringe on a brand’s patent where there were “unlicensed experiments conducted with a view to the adaption of the patented invention to the experimenter’s business.”32 As Bolar argued, this holding had the effect of extending brand company monopolies under the FDCA “for an indefinite and substantial period of time while the FDA consider[ed] whether to grant a pre-marketing clearance” to generic companies.33 If a generic company failed to gain clearance, it was required to wait until the brand drug’s patent expiry to start the test trials required for approval.34

Following the enactment of the Hatch-Waxman Act — the law that created the ANDA pathway — generic drug submissions to FDA grew substantially, straining FDA’s resources to review ANDAs on a timely basis. As a result, generic drug reviews were often sluggish and unpredictable.

Over time, FDA’s backlog grew to several thousand ANDAs, and the average time to approval exceeded 30 months, hampering patient access to quality, lower-cost generic medicines. To help ensure FDA continues to have sufficient resources to carry out its mission, Congress enacted the first Generic Drug User Fee Amendments (GDUFA) in 2012.

An overly expansive approach to obviousness would therefore mean that few things would be eligible for patent protection.69 Consider the example of combination patents. Whereas a human may not necessarily think of combining cooking recipes with recent advances in the medical sector, a computer would not be limited by such restrictions.70 Therefore, the more prior art that can be taken into account, the less likely an invention would be regarded as nonobvious.71 Moreover, while stricter patent procedures are to be generally welcomed (especially as patent offices are often criticised for being overly generous), a patent system where the benchmark involves a “skilled computer” is not without its problems. Examiners and judges would have to put themselves in the mindset of a machine and consider prior art which may be within the reach of computers, but not human beings. 72 This might be practically impossible.

In addition to the legal considerations above, there are also sound policy reasons to deny large volumes of nonsensical computer-generated text prior art status, including the need to discourage the fabrication of knowledge aimed at preventing competitors from obtaining patents in that specific area. Such disclosures could be considered as being artificially constructed in bad faith by entities which are exclusively interested in preventing the acquisition of patents by those who actually invest time and resources in research and development. Hattenbach and Glucoft further argue that publishing large amounts of nonsensical claims may impinge on the fundamental aims of the patent system and ultimately have a negative effect on social welfare: Publishing masses of nonsense achieves the opposite of what these requirements seek to accomplish—it dilutes the set of actual public knowledge, burying genuinely useful information and leaving society worse off.48

From a more practical standpoint, there are also genuine concerns that the proliferation of claims produced via AI may burden the patent offices by increasing their workload to an unprecedented extent. 49 The growth of prior art references requiring examination may jeopardise the efficiency, sustainability and the level of scrutiny currently applied to applications.50 Maintaining the existing examination standards may what therefore require more resources to be allocated to survey the enormous prior art universe, greatly increasing the costs associated with examination and requiring examiners who are both knowledgeable in the field and skilled at analysing computer-generated texts.51

One potential consequence of granting DABUS the right to invent and patent its own inventions is that this decision could open the floodgates of AI inventing. As more AI systems enter the patent scene, they theoretically could invent thousands of speculative ideas and have the right to sue anyone who accidentally stumbles across the same idea in the future. The heart of patent law is to encourage and protect innovation, not to patent thousands of speculative ideas just for inventing’s sake. Those against AI being given the rights of an inventor say this would only worsen the power of the tech elite – people who already have an inventing advantage and use that to profit off of smaller inventors who unintentionally infringe.

Further, if AI is given the right to inventorship, what would happen if that AI system infringed on another inventor’s patent? How could inventors be protected when AI faces no consequences for infringement?

Footnote 120. See PLOTKIN, supra note 70, at 102 (“Supply every engineer with state-of-the-art artificial invention technology and train them in how to use that technology, and you have effectively boosted the level of ordinary inventive skill in the field . . . .”); id. at 112 (“What this means is that the patent examiner will need to ask whether an inventor of ordinary skill, using artificial invention technology, would have found the invention at issue obvious.”). On the contrary, Plotkin recognized that if patent examiners do not acknowledge that those of ordinary skill in the art utilize invention technologies, inventors can employ these technologies to create vast numbers of patentable inventions that are obvious using advanced technologies but would not have been obvious without the technology (and thus are patentable under the “old standard”). See id. at 107 (explaining that if patents inventors do not take into account the effect of publicly available “artificial invention technology” on the inventor of ordinary skill, then there may be a “patent flood” for patents on obvious inventions); see also William Samore, Artificial Intelligence and the Patent System: Can a New Tool Render a Once Patentable Idea Obvious?, 29 SYRACUSE J. SCI. & TECH. L. 113, 142 (2013) (arguing the widespread use of genetic programming will “change invention and creative thinking” and make previously non-obvious inventions obvious and non-patentable); Saurabh Vishnubhakat, The Antitrusting of Patentability, 48 SETON HALL L. REV. 71, 95 (2017) (discussing the identification of what constitutes a person having ordinary skill).