What might happen if a patent expires...?

Recently i have been wondering a lot about what will happen when patents expire. Particularly patents that have been generating huge revenues to companies. I was tempted to investigate on this since i came to know LabVIEW, which is National Instruments proprietary software patent is set to expire on 2011. 

What would happen if a patent expires. Usually in the pharma industry, what happens is that, companies spend lot in R&D for developing drugs, which they patent and sell at quite high profitable margins. But once the patent expires, things change. Now other companies also start manufacturing the same drug. So the company that invented drug can no more sell the drug at high margins. There are even possibilities that it can loose the entire market to its competitors.

As far as the software industry is concern, the open source software's are now serious threats to proprietary software's. So like more people are migrating to Linux from windows, to open office from MS office, once a free software comes out then it could seriously affect the market of the proprietary software's. Some proprietary software's are protected by patents. Until then the company that holds the patent can mint money out of it. When the patent expires, then the company has to reduce the pricing, and seriously bank on the support they provide for their software as a weapon to push any free wares that have no support out of market.

So I'm curiously awaiting to watch what happens to LabVIEW, when its patent expires. Its interesting to note that National Instruments has stopped Mathworks from selling simulink, saying its a violation of the patent it holds for graphical data flow programming. LabVIEW is entirely based on this patent.

Working All Day

In the rapid pace of this highly competitive world, working for a fixed amount of time is soon vanishing out. Every where you turn around you could see people working all the time, round the clock, just to emerge better than others. Their very own species.

Starting from school, where you see students, having sleepless night , having tuition's, coaching classes and stuff just to beat their own friends. Just to score few extra marks than others. Then they move on to college, where again only people who put extra effort, emerge better out of the rest. Then they either get into higher studies or get a job.

Again be it a working professional or a person pursuing their PG, have to work hard. just to get better pay hikes, perks and score few extra marks than their colleagues and friends. This competition is severe every where we turn around.

People do suggest us to do smart work than hard work. But you cant beat hard work with your smart work. One day or the other, the hard working guy will have the edge over the smart worker.

I'm not here to blame the concept of this competitive world. Of course this competition is what making us better. Its the only way for improvement. Else the world would be stagnant everywhere, and surely will lead to the end of humans.

I'm simply stun by the pace at which this competition is growing. I guess if this continuous at this rate. Then, man would be highly evolved one day that, he will beat supercomputers, he will beat gigantic machines. Then there wont be any question of machines taking over humans. But its the great pace of technological developments that has caused various sci-fi writers to feel that machines could take over humans one day.

I do not have any proof for my belief. Its just the feeling that i have. I'm wondering where this is heading, and how many generations will this take, so that its effects could be felt.

Infusing AI into machines

I have been recently reading on machine learning. I found it quite interesting. Machine learning is a sub field of artificial intelligence. As I came across, various algorithms in this field and different applications its became more and more thrilling. These algorithms, though do not give computers the ability to think autonomously, there is great level of automation that could be achieved using these algorithms.

Still there are good number of AI problems that should be solved. Problems like scene analysis and natural language processing still have a wide scope for research. I feel there isn't any comprehensive algorithm for such problems that could be applied in for all cases. Though there are quite some algorithms that work well for specific cases of these problems, i feel only if an algorithm can be applied to all problems of a particular kind then it could be said that the algorithm has infused some intelligence to that machine.

There are some predictions that genetic algorithms, or genetic programming could be the stepping stone for such an algorithm, that could be used to infuse intelligence to machines autonomously. But this is debatable. There are still quite some stuff in this part of science, that i feel isn't science yet. It is still an art. For example choosing a good classifier for a particular classification problem is still a state of art. Such stuff cause doubts, that whether an autonomous AI is a possibility in the near feature.

If such things happen, then lot fictions could become true one day. The MATRIX story of man fighting highly intellectual machines could become true some day. But the future is highly unpredictable. I guess an algorithm to predict the future could be of very high value in the market now. :-)