Ladies and Gentlemen,
This is a most pleasing opportunity for an individual like me who is without formal training in the finer technicalities of law, especially patent law, but who has invented and patented a few dozen devices and systems, to have the attention for perhaps a half hour of a distinguished body of experts like you. I hope you are relaxed after a hard day's work and a good dinner, but still combative enough to give me a constructive hard time in the discussion if you find my ideas in error or missing important points, for this is how progress is made.
I remember that my reaction was one of feeling flattered rather than offended when, many years ago, Norbert Wiener, the mathematical genius and inventor of the name and concept of Cybernetics, chanced to attend a lecture I was giving at MIT on models of brain organization. In the middle of the lecture he waddled down the aisle, pushed me away from the lectern, and said, “Young man, you have just said something very important but have said it badly. What you should have said was - -“ and then he went on to restate my ideas in quite accurate but very involved form, surely less intelligible even than mine to the part of the audience that understood the idea. He showed that he understood it deeply and immediately.
Tonight I am tempted to try a whole smorgasbord of ideas and problems on you, some to offer to you what I think are unusual and useful ideas in the area of invention and its legal and technological support, some as problems requiring revamping of present legal, political and social traditions to permit optimal benefits to the community and the individual from inventive insights often in the brains of those poorly equipped to “market” or develop the concepts. Remember that we still have formidably capable “vanity” inventors who, like their counterparts in Newton's day, record their inventions in cryptographic manuscript form to be able to say “I told you so” years later, as well as the sad, sad millions of inventors who have one or two moderately unusual ideas in a lifetime and spend countless hours and dollars trying to get them patented and profitably sold.
I shall limit myself to seven topics which is about all the courses a dinner should have or all the ideas we can normally digest in one session.
First I would like to address the topic of invention as an art form, as a science and as a technology. I fear that all too many of us still cling to the idea that productive invention involves some sort of a stroke of genius or almost magical insight into a problem and its solution. True, we do have these virtuoso inventive craftsmen who invent without understanding how they do it or why. By rare circumstances of genetics and environment they happen to have data and understanding with opportunity for long practice by trial and error that allows routine thinking to create new realities. Like their counterparts in other arts such as painting, musical performance and political or religious eloquence and spellbinding, they may become masters without portfolio or certification. This , I fear, is too much the public image of invention.
Just as we have learned to convert alchemy into physics and chemistry, star-gazing
into astronomy and, to a lesser extent, learned to convert ethical principles
and; tribal taboos into law, so we can generate scientific inventions. This
we have not done to any great extent. On this I would be glad to elaborate,
but my time budget allows me to explore only two specific illustrations - invention
as a controlled aberration in an informational hyperspace and invention as linguistic
translation between mathematically or functionally equivalent concepts in diverse
technical jargon subsets of languages of thought.
The first idea can be put in relatively simple non-mathematical terms, without great loss of context, for the symbolic manipulative case that goes with computer analysis of this information theory spawned concept.
Consider that all of us of a particular generation and educational background represent a dispersion or distribution of factual information, misinformation and prejudice and that we share a goodly stock of varied figures of thought, our mutual bag of tricks. In our professional or leisure cogitation we pretty much try all of our tricks of thought on all of our presumably pertinent data and come up with the current working stock of new and old ideas reinvented. Vast as the number of combinations is, we as individuals retrace endlessly the same paths, reinvent the same ideas time after time, and are mentally tied to these tricks like ants following slowly evolving scent trails left by their predecessors. Thinking longer and harder merely imprints these paths more deeply.
Invention reprepresents jumping a short but finite distance in a deliberately illogical dimensional direction and then examining reality from this new vantage point to see whether it makes new sense. Logically this process represents formally the conversion of an inductive process which is terribly difficult or impossible into a deductive process which proceeds according to rules. Do you remember the situation when you first used it in integral calculus as contrasted to differential calculus?
We can play this game by computer in exploration of a multidimensional ideological space where the computer proposes a long succession of slightly illogical combinational ideas which are filtered by human wit and this procedure can be productive and will become more so as it becomes intellectually acceptable to have a computer guide one in thought.
Inverse to this computer-aided invention, we are currently developing in my laboratory a human-aided computer procedure for pattern discovery and recognition in a similar informational hyperspace. We use a computer synthesized stereoscopic three dimensional space in which data is presented which can be extended to higher dimensionality by utilizing three color presentation and even to eight dimensional display by utilizing a color vector index.
The user looks into this display phase-space and uses his amazingly fast and perceptive innate visual pattern recognizing and analyzing ability to tell the basically stupid computer where among the billions of possible locations the action is, whereupon it takes over the painful nitty gritty work of detailed examination.
We can also do this controlled aberration trick without instrumentation. Take
a simple case in which I am involved. We all know and respect Albert Einstein
for making the slightly crazy suggestion that physical space and time should
be considered a single four-dimensional manifold with time scaled with the factor
c, the velocity of light, and quite arbitrarily assigning a negative sign to
make it all fit. Out of this quirk has come the hard science of mass-energy
equivalence, the nuclear weapons and many other consequences in modern physics
and engineering.
We can follow Einstein's lead and jump off similarly but orthogonally in another direction. Let us postulate that biological perceived time and physical clock time are basically different concepts tied together by a common name and some common features as are the English and American languages. By constructing and “H” or “happening” transform that combines these two vectorally, much as Einstein did in special relativity but preserving a positive sign for time, we get a biologically conforming algorithm that makes it immediately understandable that events “happen” faster or slower in clock time as we become more deeply involved in event space and how events far removed in space or time become perceptually compressed.
More immediately of concern, we discover that medically, our individual life trajectories need to be time parametrized to permit a new and higher order of diagnostic analysis in which the individual is not considered homeostatic -- simply a dumb creature regulating blindly like a thermostat -but instead, a homeodynamic creature that changes rhythmically day by day where these dynamic controls must be assayed in deciding health or disease status and deciding what medical or other therapy is to be recommended. Each of us should be compared to a strand of biologically similar individuals in medical records, not to a simple grand average “normal” person. Are you aware that drugs nay vary in their potency of effect by a factor of several hundred percent depending merely on the time of day in the patient's a rhythm at which they are administered?
Now before I am lured by this discussion of homeodynamic medical care proposing to into my long favorite topics of proposing to take much of health care into the home, where it can get real tender loving care, implemented by a new generation of inexpensive computer-aided medical instruments for the home, paramedic and home short course certification, and the personally portable whole life medical history, let me return to my three sorts of scientific inventions.
I have discussed controlled aberration invention, now let me examine translational invention. To set the scene, let me expose you to an old private war-horse of mine. I shall spell a regular English word which I hope you will pronounce to yourselves. The word is U-N- I- O- N- I- Z- E- D. I will spell it again to make sure you have heard it clearly. U- N- I- O- N- I- Z- E- D. Now how many of you heard it as un-ionized? How many as union-ized? How many immediately thought of both? That is about the rate to be expected in an audience mostly concerned with business and law but also with chemistry, physics and technical manufacture.
I use this illustration to show how strongly we snap into a special context
and do not easily translate one figure of thought into a series of equivalent
figures or algorithms in another technical discipline. We are doing little to
generate multidisciplinary scientists, engineers and teachers as against interdisciplinary
ones. We keep finding isolated examples of that very rare and valuable individual
who knows in some depth practically every aspect of a business, a complex system
or a technology. He happens by chance as a mutation~ not by
deliberate education as he would if we recognized his worth. I have the pleasure
of knowing Schuyler Kleinhans, the now retired executive vice president for
advanced research of Douglas Aircraft Corporation who knew in depth practically
all the aerodynamic, propulsion, control and navigational characteristics, even
testing and marketing of the DC1 through the DC9. We need this kind of versatility
across sciences, across technologies, across communication, across computers,
across law. Can we produce the few that are needed?
An illustration of this principle for avoiding needless reinvention of the wheel comes easily to mind. Day before yesterday I was consulting with several 3M medical products research people about how to test whether medical monitoring electrodes attached to the body could be made insensitive to tags on leads and movement of the subjects limbs. I was able to offer full-blown a principle which I invented and published in 1938 in England for rapid writing of physiological data on the then common and inexpensively available glossy British toilet paper. This device was based on realizing that many common mechanical, electrical and acoustic devices obey a second order linear differential equation with terms for mass or inertia, transfer viscosity or damping and terms for compliance or springiness. I realized that, given a measure of arc, one could, by electronic integration or differentiation, synthesize artificial mass or negative mass, damping or undamping, stiffness or limpness. That principle was soon used by Britton Chance for dynamic steering of ships. It later found application in devices for automatic submarine finding, in loudspeaker design and even in an inflatable device for heart assistance. We should check list not only the tricks of our trades but the [unreadable] technological translations.
Now I would like to address an even more profitable and less harvested field of inventive plagiarism. This is what is becoming known as biomimetic design, that is, design in imitation of life, inventions that arise by analyzing with biological models structure, function, or organization for function.
It is easy to find new mathematics biomimetically. Bivalent logic combines the merits of digital and analog design in one modality and the useful aspects of Aristotelian logic with graded value judgement. Interpenetrating domain designs allow multifunctional participation of modular associative logic units. Holographic associative logic file access will almost certainly come from insight into brain structure. The electronic trigger, with which my name has become associated, was strictly intended to simulate the decisive nerve axon.
Feed-forward and hierarchical adaptive control insights arise naturally out of heuristic enhancement of biological control.
We can certainly invent meta-languages of communication between ourselves and
a new generation of computers, and we will begin to accept more intimate communicational
prosthetic couplings to ourselves.
This discussion of far-out inventiveness could go on endlessly, but we must return to the practical. How much attention have you given to the formation of constructive idea stealing? I find it easy to invent in a month more devices, systems, principles, than I can possibly develop, patent and market in a year, having no effective development laboratory and marketing affiliation or facility within the University structure. Competent developers and manufacturers are wary of inventions that come free, and value much more highly those for which they have to pay, or those where they exercise a modicum of cupidity in acquisition. I find it a viable alternative to direct development, to make ideas available subliminally for “adoption” or reinvention or outright stealing. I can get at least ten ideas gently ‘adopted” or “reinvented” for each I have time to develop in-house with our limited facilities. Persistence is also important in getting inventions stolen. A really novel invention typically usually requires ten to fifteen years of conscientious dangling before it will be effectively snapped up and adopted. I have found it most instructive to insert neolinguistic tags to mark inventions in order to trace their progress into development and utilization. People are remarkably unlikely to change names associated with ideas.
Two issues remain. One is a proposal for the use of technology transfer in a novel way to help us escape from the admitted “slump” in American competitive status in technological application for the economic and social benefit of our national, local and family communities. The other is an accusation directed primarily at the legal community in an effort to gain its help in solving a problem of legislation and regulation in which we, as a nation, are strangling.
The proposal is to utilize the idea behind the new practice of “Problem Oriented Medical Health Care Delivery” translated into general high-technology industry terms and aided by transfer of control-theory models of the hierarchically adaptive composite feed—back, feed—forward type from systems engineering to our current socio-economic-political scene.
The Problem Oriented Medicine concept examines first where the patient deviates from the optimal position or an accessible sub-optimal status to which we can hope to bring him, It then undertakes corrective therapy. This contrasts strongly with the conventional practice of testing everything testable to avoid malpractice suits and then choosing a conveniently titled disease entity or entities to treat.
Neither in health nor in social economic status have we undertaken the epidemiological study of individually parameterized optimal status. We simply do not know, except intuitively, what the public and we ourselves would most like to have from the resources of the nation, quantitatively stated and presented by groups including outlyers in the population — not merely the central tendency and standard deviation. In simple practical terms we need to know — given a scenario presentation with conviction of its feasibility, of several life styles what would we individually choose. We can have much of this assortment if we will treat it as a systems engineering problem, making inventions as needed to specifications , not haphazardously.
True, there may be spin-off inventions and unforeseen problems, but this is characteristic of active life processes - living a little dangerously but preserving strong survival potential.
Finally there is the problem of regulation and control inhibition of technical and economic progress. Another time I would like to expand for you on the evolution of current adversary binary law and regulations as a device for convenience of regulators, legislators and the legal profession traceable to the transition from Greek to Roman dominance.
Today I will adhere to the facts. We regulate, legislate and judge binarily - innocent or guilty, good or bad, instead of forcing upon the deciding agency the far more difficult but vastly more rewarding task of deciding where optimality lies. We should not prohibit completely all carcinogens - instead we should accept each at a level worth its risk which we need to learn to evaluate quantitatively. The bivalent logic allows us to say all or none on items so trivially dangerous or of so very little merit that they can preferably be accepted or eliminated as a class but may need quantitatively balanced acceptance. Does the slight but finite hazard from trace lead fumes in auto exhaust justify substantial increase in our drain on limited resources to make a workable no-lead fuel? By how many dollars should we be willing to raise the cost of a hospital day and how much should we reduce instrumental reliability to protect against a risk if one in some millions of getting a possibly dangerous electric shock? I am suggesting that we do indeed place a price on human life — but a high and cleverly bargained one that gives us a very safe and rewarding life at an acceptable risk rate.
I, for example, willingly accept about a 2% lifelong risk of getting involved in a damaging aircraft accident. This I consider a good bargain as against utilizing much more dangerous ground transportation or restricting myself to electric or mechanical communication. We could be much freer to do what we want individually with greater technological support if we bargained sharply with nature and our international counterparts to reach an optimal level of risk and reward as against a totally unrealistic perfection.
In summary, we have a nearly untouched reservoir of resources for systematic
stimulation of inventive problem solving, inventing to order for the benefit
of the inventor and his community, if you will.