EAGER: Can artificial intelligence (AI) invent? And if so, so what?

EAGER：人工智能 (AI) 可以发明吗？

• 批准号: 1947271
• 负责人: Jose Lobo
• 金额: $ 27.66万
• 依托单位: Arizona State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-04-01 至 2023-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1947271&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: EAGER; artificial; intelligence; AI; invent

Sustained economic development depends upon the intensity and productivity of efforts devoted to inventive activity. There is a growing concern that the productivity of human inventive activity (as measured by the number of patent applications per patent author) is declining, and that this decline may reflect the growing volume and complexity of technical knowledge and the increasing effort needed to identify intellectual novelty. Computer scientists and proponents of Artificial Intelligence (AI) suggest that, because of AI’s ability to execute combinatorial search effectively and rapidly, AI might be helpful in the search for new inventions. This proposition begets two research questions: can AI invent and, if so, will AI invention augment or displace human inventors? The project examines the current and potential inventive capabilities of AI by tapping into insights accumulated from the study, across many disciplines, of how humans have invented throughout our history. This deep historical perspective, coupled with detailed empirical investigations on the nature of invention, has generated a robust narrative about the salient characteristics of the processes underlying human invention. The project brings these insights on the nature of human invention together with assessments by leading AI experts about the type of inventive activity AI can perform now and the type of inventive activity AI could be expected to perform in the foreseeable future. These insights and assessments will inform consideration of whether AI can help mitigate the difficulties encountered by researchers as they search for new knowledge and create new technologies.The research effort includes: (1) convening a meeting of experts on human invention (drawn from industry and academia in fields such as computer science, engineering, economics, anthropology, psychology, and other disciplines) about the inventive capabilities of AI to assess AI’s current inventive capacities and consider what would constitute signals that AI’s inventive capacities are increasing; (2) developing a deeper understanding of combinatorial invention using patent records to classify the types of inventive novelty generated by the recombination of existing knowledge; (3) assessing which AI capabilities match the different types of combinatorial invention revealed in patents. The research will be reviewed at the end of each year by a subset of the experts who will advise on priorities for research in the subsequent period. The research and insights gathered about how AI invention can offset the decline in human inventive productivity will be summarized in “white papers” to be accessible to the general public online; full versions of the papers will be submitted for publication in peer-reviewed journals.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

持续的经济发展取决于致力于创造性活动的努力的强度和生产率。人们越来越担心，人类发明活动的生产力（以每个专利作者的专利申请数量衡量）正在下降，这种下降可能反映了技术知识的数量和复杂性不断增加，以及确定知识新奇所需的努力越来越多。计算机科学家和人工智能（AI）的支持者认为，由于AI能够有效和快速地执行组合搜索，AI可能有助于寻找新的发明。这一命题引出了两个研究问题：人工智能能发明吗？如果能，人工智能的发明会增强或取代人类发明家吗？该项目通过利用从研究中积累的见解来研究人工智能的当前和潜在的创造能力，跨越许多学科，研究人类在整个历史上是如何发明的。这种深刻的历史视角，加上对发明本质的详细实证研究，产生了一个关于人类发明过程的显著特征的强有力的叙述。该项目将这些关于人类发明本质的见解与领先的人工智能专家对人工智能现在可以执行的发明活动类型以及人工智能在可预见的未来可能执行的发明活动类型的评估结合起来。这些见解和评估将有助于考虑人工智能是否可以帮助减轻研究人员在寻找新知识和创造新技术时遇到的困难。研究工作包括：（一）召开人类发明专家会议（来自计算机科学、工程、经济学、人类学、心理学等领域的工业界和学术界，和其他学科）关于人工智能的发明能力，以评估人工智能目前的发明能力，并考虑什么将构成人工智能的发明能力正在增加的信号;（二）利用专利记录对现有技术的重组所产生的发明新奇的类型进行分类，以加深对组合发明的理解。知识;（3）评估哪些人工智能能力与专利中揭示的不同类型的组合发明相匹配。每年年底将由一部分专家对研究进行审查，他们将就下一阶段的研究优先事项提出建议。关于人工智能发明如何抵消人类发明生产力下降的研究和见解将被总结在“白色文件”中，供公众在线访问;论文的全文将提交同行发表，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查进行评估，被认为值得支持的搜索.