Changes and a Pearl Metaphor for Rebuilding the Economy after Covid-19

West Coast –> East Coast

While alluding to big changes in a post from December 2018, I never explained–partly because nearly everything was in flux.

Now that the dust has settled, I am a tenured full Professor at George Mason University, Antonin Scalia Law School. Beyond that, I took on the role of Executive Director of the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property, a Center I had already been affiliated with from nearly its inception.

As part of my mandate to expand innovation and entrepreneurship law programs at Mason/Scalia, I also launched the Innovation Law Clinic last fall. I am also serving as the Law School’s representative on University committees creating the new Institute for Digital InnovAtion (IDIA) and a brand new, mixed-use building on the Arlington Campus (where the Law School is located) that will house IDIA, the Clinic, an outpost of the Mason Office of Technology Transfer, incubator space, and private developer commercial spaces enhancing the Campus as the hub of the Arlington Innovation District.

While all of these things–including my move from Seattle to the East Coast–were in the works before Amazon announced Arlington/Crystal City as the location for HQ2, that development has certainly turbocharged innovation district plans. Further, these efforts are aimed not just at Arlington, or even Northern Virginia (NoVa) and its Rosslyn-Ballston-Dulles tech corridor, but all of the DC, Maryland, and Virginia metro area (the “DMV”).

Re-opening the economy will be like rebuilding a pearl, layer by layer

We all now realize that re-opening the economy may be harder than locking it down. In this op-ed for The Hill, I use a theme I had been pondering for a decade or so about how civilizations break down and fail to re-start. When a major disruption occurs, it effectively cracks a complex system of essential interactions that necessarily developed layer by layer, with each making the next possible. Thus, just like a broken pearl, the economy, or even entire civilization, cannot be simply put back together. Instead the layers have to be rebuilt in sequence. We can speed up the process to some degree, but we cannot bypass the essential layers.

Avoiding another Great Depression through a developmentally layered reopening of the economy

I also gave an interview on this op-ed to WBAL AM-FM:

Interview and audio courtesy of WBAL NewsRadio AM-FM on Twitter @wbalradio


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Video of FTC Panel on Competition Policy and Copyright

Thank to the FTC for inviting me to join this timely panel. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/audio-video/video/ftc-hearing-4-oct-23-session-3-competition-policy-copyright-law

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First four draft chapters of The Means of Innovation now on SSRN

With all the moves and changes over the past year+, this blog has gotten very stale. Not sure anyone will even be checking in, but I hope to revive it.

 

The first four draft chapters of The Means of Innovation: Creation, Control, Method+ology (forthcoming Oxford University Press) are now available at my SSRN author’s page:

Ch. 1: Methods as the Locus of Human Innovation

Ch. 2: Abstractions and Different Levels of Methods

Ch. 3: Art as Techné and Production

Ch. 4: Science as Knowledge Through Contemplative Systematic Study

Categories: Art, Commerce, Commercialization, Creativity, Entrepreneurship, Goods/Artifacts, Innovation, Law, Methods, Science, Services, Technology, Uncategorized

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More Real Than Television

Contemplating the inauguration from here in France, and it seemed the best thing to do was digitize and post this old track of mine, which is more relevant now than it was then.

 

Categories: Art, Creativity, Fine Arts

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Google Magenta’s AI melody and 4 Canadian songwriters

Google’s Magenta artificial intelligence (AI) project produced a basic piano melody that was then given a drum machine background (apparently added by humans not an AI program) and released to the public:

Canadian media outlet The Star had four songwriters try to flesh out the melody into a full fledged song:

In this post, I’ll take a somewhat different approach in assessing this AI generated music–and perhaps surprisingly without focusing too much on the question of authorship.

The Magenta melody is presented as another step toward AI generation of creative expression. If that goal is achieved, the question is whether human expression will continue to flourish or whether it will be “outsourced” to algorithms. I don’t think anyone can really say at this point what would happen if/when the algorithms produce expression as good as, or perhaps even “better” than, what humans create. We’ll find out at such time as it might happen and such music starts entering the music ecosystem.

So for now, the practical question is whether this Magenta melody is “as good as” what humans produce. Or, more precisely, would the average person listening to this melody find it “musical” enough to satisfy at least one of the roles which music plays in their life, whether that be as foreground point of focus or background to another activity? The latter is probably the lower bar. Music that is pleasing or soothing or inspiring often serves as an almost subliminal part of many environments. And so long as the sequence of sounds is not jarring or disturbing, it may well suffice for that role. Grabbing our attention and provoking some emotive or intellectual response is a much higher bar. AI generated content may not need to meet that bar to still be deemed successful. In fact, the likely first areas in which AI music would be adopted would be these kinds of background or auxiliary roles (think elevators, waiting rooms, etc.).

I posit that the real challenge for even the low bar of background music is not in creating melodies or even whole musical passages that are coherent enough–in terms of sounding like music and avoiding dissonant sequences–but rather in creating music that flows naturally, especially in the sense of swinging or having a groove.

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Categories: Art, Creativity, Electrical & Digital Arts, Fine Arts, Innovation, Intellectual Property, Law

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