A trio of Google engineers recently came up with a futuristic way to help anyone who stumbles through presentations on video calls. They propose that when algorithms detect a speaker's pulse racing or "umms" lengthening, a generative AI bot that mimics their voice could simply take over. That cutting-edge idea wasn't revealed at a big company event or in an academic journal. Instead, it appeared in a 1,500-word post on a little-known, free website called TDCommons.org Until WIRED received a link to an idea on TDCommons last year and got curious, Google had never spoken with the media about its website.

Comment Future AI could be a challenge for US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) officials, who need to wrap their heads around complex technology that's perhaps not quite compatible with today's laws. Under the Department of Commerce, the USPTO's core mission is to protect intellectual property, or IP. Creators file patent applications in hope of keeping competitors from copying their inventions without permission, and patents are supposed to allow businesses to thrive with their own novel designs while not stifling wider innovation. Fast evolving technologies, such as deep learning, are pushing the limits of today's IP policies and rules. Clerks are trying to apply traditional patent approval rules to non-trivial machine-learning inventions, and bad decisions could result in a stranglehold on competition among public and private AI creators.

Technology giants such as Alibaba and IBM are eating startup innovators' lunch. These behemoths are seeking to devour even more market share by publishing patents at unprecedented speed in emerging technologies such as blockchain. As some of the richest companies on the planet, the corporations have the resources to manage the laborious search of existing patents and to overcome the outdated administrative hurdles so that they can file for intellectual property rights. Patents are definitely old school. Patent laws started with the rise of the nation-state, so they began in the 18th century and were then fully developed in the 19th century.

Over the past couple of days, I've been thinking about the late, great 30 Rock--in particular, an episode from Season 1. Dennis Duffy (Dean Winters), the marvelously terrible boyfriend of Liz Lemon (Tina Fey), is a bit of a technology entrepreneur--by which I mean he is the Beeper King, the last beeper salesman on Manhattan. "Which is cool," his then-girlfriend Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) tells a skeptical friend. But when he tries to sell beepers to her staff of TV writers, she loses it and tells him to leave. "You work in a business. Businesspeople need beepers," he insists.

The company "will not stand by" as rivals "infringe on our intellectual property" by making similar competing machines, according to a statement. We've reached out to the companies targeted by the lawsuits and will let you know how they're responding, although it's safe to say they aren't likely to roll over. At first blush, the infringement claims appear to be part of a classic competitive strategy: if you're an early participant in an industry that's rapidly heating up, sue the competition to slow them down. While iRobot still has the best-known models, there's a very real chance that it gets overshadowed by latecomers -- especially anyone that can offer more for your money.

Google's self-driving car project that began in 2009 is well known as the incubator that kickstarted a multi-billion dollar race to perfect this 21st automotive technology. Along the way, it also helped Google amass hundreds, perhaps thousands, of patents covering every aspect of software, hardware and on-road behavior for automated vehicles. The blistering lawsuit filed against Uber and its Otto driverless truck unit by Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo alleging trade secret theft, based on alleged actions by a former Google engineer now at Uber, also makes clear that the company intends to aggressively protect that patent trove and big head start. Automated vehicle tech will be a game changer, creating the possibility of huge reductions in traffic deaths, ubiquitous low-cost urban transportation and potential relief for drivers from the soul-crushing tedium of congested highways. Like any transformative technology, scores of companies smell revenue opportunities and are jumping into the space quickly.