After news emerged that a multi-disciplinary team led by the University of Surrey successfully filed the first ever patent applications for inventions autonomously created by AI without a human inventor, Ian Bolland caught up with team leader Professor Ryan Abbott about the potential knock-on effect for life sciences.
Professor Abbott began by explaining the potential effects the filing will have on life sciences and other industries.
“These filings are important to any area of research and development as well as any area that relies on patents. Patents are more important in the life sciences than in many other areas, particularly for drug discovery. AI has also been used extensively in the drug discovery process for a long time for tasks like screening of compounds and in silico analysis. These tasks can be the foundation for patent filings.
“As AI is becoming increasingly sophisticated, it is likely to play an increasing role in R&D including in the life sciences. It is an exciting prospect that AI may be able to improve the efficiency of some historically very inefficient practices. Pharma and tech companies are likely to develop AI to automate more and more of the drug discovery process.”
Abbott believes that AI is going to become more autonomous because of its current trends, and its continuing and progressive involvement in R&D. According to Michael Dukakis Institute for Leadership and Innovation (MDI), AI can be an important tool to relieve people of resource constraints and arbitrary/inflexible rules in R&D, but AI algorithms should follow ethical principles that promote fairness and avoid unjust effects on people.
The original article can be found here.