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Patenting Your Computer's Inventions
daghlian writes "Here's a New York Times article (insert free registration comment here) about what to do patentwise when intelligent systems come up with patentable ideas. Interesting quote, in the context of the recent (and justified, IMO) kvetching here, is this: 'A patent is denied when an invention is obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art....'" But what if the 'person' to whom an invention is obvious is silicon-based? Things at the USPTO could get even screwier than they are today.
so, let's rather dicuss the consequences of time travel again: what if i travel back in time and patent the internet?
things. take. time.
After the debate over who gets the credit, the blame-debate begins. There's not much question about the blame when the computers of today screw up, but what if the future AI computer made the error by it self? Makes you think....
Hopefully by the time this actually becomes a problem (any bets on when AI is going to actually happen? It's been more delayed than W2K), we will have ditched the patent scheme and consigned it to the rubbish bin...
-- "I believe the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully." - George W. Bush, 29 September 2000
When automated drivers start crashing into me on the highway I start looking for liability. And if that automated driver was a self-contained, autonomous being that is otherwise incapable of making a sensible rebuttle in court, what am I to do then? Do I sue the makers? That's like suing parents -- it just doesn't hold for something legally declared a being. But can we punish something that has no real regrets. Cannot sentients decide to kill without us knowing, obviated from liability by the nature of their ability to clone in an electronic existence. And as punishment, should we just switch the power off, that doesn't satiate me very much if I've just lost my family in a car accident to an artificial being. If the sentient was incapable to save lives, I can forgive. If a true sentient is unwilling to preserve life, how am I to correct it?
The ability of our artificial children to procreate, evolve, patent ideas, explore space, or serve up new fancy types of porn, doesn't concern me. My primary concerns are with the liability of sentient artificial entities, as the punishment and recuperate is as likely to work on artificial beings as it is on humans. Throw them in jail with a bunch of other sentients so they learn how not to get caught.
It's safe to presume that anything that can be legally declared intelligent will, on average, be by definition smarter than the vast majority of the human population. How are we to adapt to sentients other than ourselves, that will be created to be intelligent (rather than bred for jollies)?
My computer learned how to blow a power supply last week. Since I have no idea on how to do that by myself, can I patent the technology the computer used? But to do so, I'll probably have to figure out a way to read the smoke signals. Good thing I taped them!
***
Take a look at the website above for a look at my new computer case. The Book-Case =)
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
I have always wondered about Chess players patenting some of their moves. To me, it appears that they could satisfy all the requirements for patentability.
(1) Occasionally, a brilliant GM might discover a move that has never been documented before - qualifies as having no prior art.
(2) The move might be sophisticated enough that it is not obvious to a lot of good Chess players, let alone the commoners - qualifies as being non-obvious.
(3) The move is after all a process, a design - qualifies for a "method" patent.
So, what happens then? You can't ever play that move unless you license it? Whoa.
I was thinking about that supposedly remarkable move that Deep Blue played against Kasparov in Game Four of their rematch - which even Kasparov admitted showed signs of the machine's "intelligence". Would IBM have been able to patent it (if they had applied for one before someone documented the game)?
Sreeram.
Untill intelligent computers have rights I think the owners of the patents will get to be the owners of the computer. If someone gains great help in creating their invention by their toolset the toolset isn't going to be the owner of the patent no matter how good it is. Likewise the computer will never be the owner of the patent no matter how good it is. Computers don't yet have any rights so they therefor can't own anything or own any patents.
As for liability as far as I know the liability rests with the person manufacturing the product. Not even the patent owner. Let alone the tool that made it.
I think all this talk about computers becoming more intellegent and capable than man all points to one thing: It's time to ensure Man's superiority through genetic engineering!! Sure it's controversial, but being as dumb as we are is nothing to be proud of. Not only do I think we should improve our brains, I think it's inevitable.
If your computer invents something patentable it's all yours. How complex is that ? Just like if your care drags goods to market you get paid for the transport.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Not only would this solve the problem of patent infringement, it would allow needed improvements to be made and implemented by anyone who wished to do so. Any improvements suggested can be used by the manufacturers of GPL'd products, similar to the updates to the linux kernel given by various companies selling distributions of the program.
A discovery is patentable (just look at the whole human genome/celera/Craig Venter issue).
If you can buy expensive sequencers, sequence the human genome and patent your "discoveries" There should be nothing stopping you from buying expensive computers, start factoring primes and start pantent all the undocumented ones.
I might be far off here but I really dont see why you shouldn't be able to patent prime numbers.
please enlighten me.
L: slashdolt
P: slashdolt
For those who simply refuse to create acounts on these sites let's start a "slashdolt" ring.
There is now an acount at NWT with "slashdolt" for both name and password because that other L/P combo dosn't seam to work anymore.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Seems that the existing patent system is becoming more and more irrelevent (or hard to apply) in today's fast-advancing technology... However, I like it that the article pointed out the original intention of the patent system:
Absolutely so. We have seen many examples of how the current patent system just fails to achieve this goal: ie. to give a limited reward to human innovation. Although it has worked before, it's starting to show signs of becoming decrepit. We've had problems with people abusing the system by patenting, eg., a well-known algorithm, and having the patent go through because of incompetence/ignorance of the people at the patent office. And now we have "inventions" made by computer algorithms, which seems to be a monkey wrench thrown into the patent system.
Rather than try to patch up the patent system and keep it going, perhaps it's time to reconsider the original goals of the patent system. The original goal was to reward the human inventor for his invention. I guess the bottom line is, of what form should this reward be? Under the existing patent system, it is to give the inventor exclusive rights to his invention for a certain period of time, and to give him the authority to allow/prohibit others' using of his invention. But is this still relevant today (and in the future)?
I'm thinking of the difference between the reward given to a patent owner and the reward given (or the gratification experienced) by an Open Source developer who is proud that he can share his ideas and have the community accept them. I don't know how applicable Open Source is to patents in general, but as far as software and software-related stuff is concerned, it seems that the "ego gratification" of developing an Open Source project does not suffer from the same shortcomings as the existing patent system.
Disclaimer: IANAL.
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
This is already being done with the human genetics, that is the computer number cruncher decoding them and then the human owner patenting them.
With the exception of there no longer being a patent system when AI can accomplish this, I am sure the owner or creator will want to reap any such rewards.
I think I read that in the introduction to a book on Prolog (remember it? that was supposed to be the AI language).
Whatever happened to Prolog anyway? Is is anywhere anymore?
Jeez, this all is getting out of hand. I just finished reading "Player Piano" by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., which deals to an extent with this. The third industrial revolution he calls it...
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Play Six Pack Man. I
I guess this is as much an 'ask slashdot' as a response, but it seems relevant..
What's the story with patents aquired in other countries? Can I patent something here in Australia and have the protections provided by that patent automatically apply in, say, the US (in the same way copyright works). If so, has anyone done comparisons on the ease/cost/speed of getting patents in different countries? Can I patent something 'outrageous' in a country whose patent law and practice is somewhat more flexible and expect it to hold in other countries?
Alternately, if you have to get seperate patents in every country in which you want protection, does the fact you already have a patent for gadget X in country Y get you any sort of fast-tracking when you want to re-patent gadget X in country Z? Does this still apply if gadget X would not normally survive the patent process in country Z because patent law and practice in country Z tends to be a bit tighter than in country Y?
... and in a related story Sonys' artifially intelligent dog, Aibo, patented a new stretching maneuver that will allow dogs to have a more fullfilling stretch with about 10% less effort. The stretch is performed by laying flat on your stomach with your fore legs and hind legs stretched straight out. After a moment of laying like this it is important to twirl your hind legs two or three times. If you have realplayer you can see what it looks like.This is system is expected to save dogs billions of dollars in energy over the next few years. Royalties to use this patented system have not yet been released.
Need a website host? Try out http://WebQualityHost.net
What about if the robot was a neural system? For me, this isn't just idle debate; I've worked extensively with neural networks, even in the context of robotic intelligence. The one thing I can tell you right now is that you DO get robots with personality disorders. In one of my preliminary tests, I had a computer vision system go into "complete negative lockdown", which is the equivalent to suicidal depression.
Granted, at the 50-neuron level, it certainly was not self-aware. However, most of my decent tests of neural systems all point to the existance of true artificial intelligence in them. Yes, it is about as intellegent as a ringworm, and possesses all the intelectual and emotional development of one.
But the point is, from the second I switch on a neural network, I hardly have the foggiest notion what it'll be like. The same matrix that went negative-lockdown stayed "sane" for about a full minute when I tried the same test with the room lights darker.
While other experimental techniques like genetic algorithms, fuzzy logic and adaptive knowledge-based systems do still have the capability to mess up in ways the designer did not intend (your favorite search engine is proof of that), neural networks (which most experts believe is the most promising currently) have the capability for a MUCH larger range of reactions.
Somehow I doubt many of us would like to have "Marvin the Paranoid Android" driving our car. But with neural systems, you cannot be sure about the differences between one neural map and another. The equations for them become exponentially complex with netsize, so much so that for a 50-neuron system, the equations are often hundreds or even thousands of pages long.
Oh, and it doesn't necessarily take an AI system to design something patentable. A simple brute-force "try everything until it works" system works quite well for any problem domain with a well-defined method of simulation (mechanical design, architecture, etc). While the calculations would take months to perform, I have seen a few of these work wonders.
Just the opinion of somebody who dabbles in AI professionally.
It seems that the person that instructed the computer to work on a given problem would hold the patent. The person that put the computer on a task does not have to be the inventor of the software/hardware, nor whould the inventor, if it is not the person using the device, get the patent. It just seems to me that this is the most logical "solution".
I hate this sig, but im too lazy to change it.
Okay, now I'm really looking forward to that sort of advance... :-)
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Untill intelligent computers have rights I think the owners of the patents will get to be the owners of the computer
The owners of the computer, or the authors of the software? In cases where patents have been rewarded (Linden's antenna algorithms) it seems to have been the author of the software, rather than the owner of the hardware who gets the patent.
This was reported on in Science News a few months ago. Unfortunately it only appeared in the pulp-and-staples publication, not the online one. But a little search through the patent office turned up only a patent on the algorithms themselves, not on the antennas that the algorithm invented. Unless I really misunderstood the abstract.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
"Since the computer is a machine developed over many years by many different people, it seems to me that no one should really own the work they do."
Substitute "pen" for "computer" in the above sentence, and see how absurd it sounds.
And yet, both "pen" and "computer" are generic tools, patented by no one (at least in the broad, generic sence), and as such they are available for use by anyone to research and discover new ideas and new processes. Sure, the "computer" is much more powerful and advanced than the "pen" in many ways, but they are still fundamentally both tools (with the current state of computer/AI technology, you could hardly argue it is something greater than simply that).
Slashdot is entertaining like pro wrestling is entertaining
Oh, wait a minute, I have to apply at the patent office, don't I? Hmm, could be a problem...
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Am I the only person who loves this guy? Grits are funny.
haven't been a moderator recently eh?
i've noticed things have changed... in fact it seems to encourage playing out 5 points in around 100-200 posts... in extremely large stories you'll notice that moderator points only go so far...
Seems to me that in the case of a computer inventing something, and the computer's owner/operator getting credit for it, the definition for the denial of a patent needs to be modified a bit. Change it to 'A patent is denied when the idea to set up and program a computer to search for/devise an invention is obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art....' and it almost makes sense. Of course, my wording's probably a bit awkward, but you get the idea...
The only problem I could not solve with time travel is the English language. Messes with tense, big time!
Mattel retaliates against injured geek!
First, we must agree on definitions. Sleep (we assume complete unconsciousness) can be defined as a state in which no mental activity takes place, a state that is preceded and followed by states in which mental activity does take place. Death can be defined as a state in which no mental activity takes place, a state preceded but followed by one of neural activity. (In a human, there exist other biological differences between sleep and death, but a lack of computer activity is far more equivalent to a lack of a computer than a lack of human activity is to lack of a human. In both cases our definitions hold; they are merely more complete when applied to computers. Imagine a world in which the dead could be brought back to life at will. Because we have agreed that biological constraints--such as a decaying body--are of no relevance, then those brought back to life cannot be considered to have been truly dead in the first place; only those never revived can be considered thus.)
We are assuming, as well, that the universe will not exist forever in an incarnation in which sentience is possible; new inflationary cosmological theories support this view. (In addition, a closed universe existing forever in a sentience-permitting form--at intervals, at least--would completely eliminate death of any kind in both humans and computers; we therefore will discard its possibility for the purposes of this discussion.) There is a time limit, then, and the discrete possibility that an off computer will never be turned on.
In a purely classical universe (that is, one without quantum mechanics) we could, with enough information, extrapolate the future of any computer turned off, see whether a renewed power supply exists in its future, and therefore determine whether it is dead or merely sleeping. With quantum mechanics in play, however, truly unpredictable submicroscopic events could scale up--al la Schrodinger's cat, not just through incredibly improbable jumping and tunneling combinations--to form a truly unpredictable world, no matter the amount of information. Because each particle, until observed, is in multiple states, and because this throws its surroundings into multiple states--the cat, again--then in theory the future of a computer could be in a multiple state--that is, a computer could occupy the duel state of sleep/death. Of course, it is also possible that no quantum even would come into play, that the computer would therefore be, most likely, dead.
Make that: Death can be considered a state preceded but NOT followed by conciousness.
In cases where patents have been
rewarded (Linden's antenna algorithms) it seems to have been the author of the software, rather
than the owner of the hardware who gets the patent.
That may well be,because, in my view, assuming you compiled it for the right OS, and had some hardware of your own to run it on, why would you patent it for the hardware? the hardware isn't what's creating the antennae, it's the software. yes, the hardware runs the software, but it's not just that particular piece/pieces of hardware that can run the software, no?
Insert mind here.
'A patent is denied when an invention is obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art....'
/.ers will agree with me when I say some of the recent patents we have seen really show that something is wrong. Many other laws are being rethought because of technological advances; shouldn't this be one of them?
It seems to me, if there is software available commercially which comes up with patent-worthy advances, then anyone who could buy it would have the "ordinary skill" it takes to come up with those same advances. Shouldn't that therefore disqualify most patents based on the work of computers (such as those in the article)?
If that isn't so, or in the cases where that would not apply, I think the patents(and any applicable copyrights) should belong to the user of the program. After all, if I use software today to develop new products, I can patent them, but the software developer can't. A computer program, no matter how advanced (within the foreseeable future, at least) is only a tool, and patents do not go to the tool maker, only the user.
My only other thought on this matter is, regardless of how this particular issue may be resolved, I think the time has come to reevaluate patent laws. I think most
arent both concepts grand?
i mean really, the only people who win from EITHER concept are the lawyers.. the disturbing trend for society to 'pass the buck' when it comes to blame, but attempt to scrape every last cent out of any idea people come up with is really begining to tick me off..
maybe someone should patent a device that thwarts ambulance chasing lawyers?
i wish
back on topic, removing patents alltogether would be a much more elegant solution than attempting to legislate around it.. but once again.. im dreaming..
maybe we should award the governments of the world a degree in Honorary Hack Coding for their continued efforts to fix a problem the most inexplicably difficult way because it looks faster than the obvious yet elegant solution?
dms0
oh where oh where did my login go?
powering off is a slap on the wrist. re-formatting the long-term storage is death. re-formatting to run Windows 95 with an WinAmiga emulator running on it which is running Emplant Mac emulator for Amiga which is running the Windows emulator for Mac, showing the blue screen of death in a window in a window in a window... is hell. can I patent the greatest concept of the next millenium..... the OpenBible GPL project? -One Species Under Science- p.s. Great Hack?: 9fingers demo ran on my 8mhz Amiga, streaming off the floppy drive, with an amazing soundtrack and full screen non-linear video. -sig sigue sputnik- derek@instanet.com
...Old news. I pointed all of this out weeks ago on slashdot in a article on Genetic Algorythms. The thing is, what is non-obvious today may be obvious tomorrow. Witness how these learning programs usually start off by discovering all the solutions that we know about already - including the ones that have been patented.
Any computer is still a lot less intelligent than any human (in most ways). and IMHO if an invention can be found by a computer executing a detrministic program, then it shouldn't be patentable. Any existing patent should be revoked.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Patents made by 'ideas' from machines are about as reasonable as patenting genes from the human body (which have existed for millions of years and weren't 'invented' by anyone) or patenting software techniques (i.e. patents for 'selling over the web', etc.).
The U.S. PTO has been driven to the ridiculous by unrepentent greed in the private sector and a complete absence of guidance by our politicians and courts. Blecchh, retch!
I think the end result will be that many countries around the world will begin to simply ignore the more ridiculous U.S. patents. This will, in turn, lead to a general weakening of the global patchwork of laws that protect intellectual property, heightening tensions and fostering trade disputes and protectionist tendencies.
Way to go guys...
Generally you have one year to file all your foreign patents after filing with the PTO. (Note I said 'filing' - not the date your patent is granted.)
In the EU, you must seek a seperate patent and must designate each country you want patent protection in and pay all requisite fees required.
Taiwan and China are a seperate ball game and must be obtained seperately.
All of this information came from the book "Patent it Yourself" by David Pressman which is available at Amazon.
Could a computer's invention count as prior art?
Just assume someone lets a large cluster of machines produce "inventions" and publishes the results (on a website?).
Would this stop others from patenting those inventions?
What if projects like distributed.net would do this?
Genetic Algorithms are a tool. Carpenters use hammers and engineers are starting to use GA's.
When a carpenter builds a house it is considered his, not his hammer's for the ingenious angles it allowed him to pound the nails.
When an engineer applies a Genetic Algorithm to a certain problem and comes up with a new and unique solution it is because of the engineer's ingenuity not the GA's.
To use a GA you have to model the attributes of what you are trying to optimize very well. This takes a lot of skill. For instance exactly how would you model a GA that started out with candels as an optimium solution and produced a lightbulb?
Score: Thomas Edison 1, GA 0.
GA's are just a search tool for finding optimum solutions to a problem. They still need people to set them up.
--Anything can be made to work if you fiddle with it long enough.(Wyszkouski)
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
The same rules apply.
A patent is denied when an invention is obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art...
I'd say server side caching (bravo Yahoo) and session/cookie handling combined with services (voila Amazon) is pretty damn obvious to anyone in the business. How professionally does the patent office handle requests like this? Do they ask non-biased persons on internet tech advice? If someone else (A) has been using a technique that B tries to patent, is it a valid patent? Who tries to get all these ridiculous patents? Surely it isn't developers, they know better. Die marketing - die! :)
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
Hey, think about it. The AI bunch has failed miserably on the promise of machine thought. Just *when* is some brilliant genius going to write a "code filter" that will generate useful computer code? Here are some of the issues:
:). This also points out the recursive problem of where we get *our* inspiration from... Hmmm. (I smell a rant/flame/religious debate starting here.)
1. Good code is HIGHLY structured, and EXTREMELY non-random. That's why you can't just hook up a white gaussian noise generator front-end to a compiler. And if it was easy, we'd all be great programmers, and we know that's not true (like micro-squish).
2. How do you tell good/useful code from bad (thus the "filter")? Yes, we (programmers/users) can tell the difference, but testing a potential code snippet in a virtual machine and observing its behavior may not be an efficient mechanism. I'd be willing to estimate that a great many good code snippets are only useful in *very* limited contexts and only with suitable surrounding code.
3. We still don't have a handle on entropy vs. organization. My humble observations of complex systems that we've created, like GPS navigation, all require order being impressed into the system from outside the system. You know, like full unabridged dictionaries coming out of printing press explosions
4. Finally, I think that all to many of us are buying into the idea that Science (TM) can solve everything. Science fails miserably when it treads too far into the philosophical/ethical/moral/religious arena. But that starts a whole other set of rants/flames/holy wars.
O.K., flame me if you must, but THINK about the issues first. Let's try to shine some light in this dark closet we live in.
This is actually a comment giving the latest login and password for the New York Times for those of us who don't want to create an account there. Arguably offtopic, but there you go. Go on, give him his karma back.
CDNow! have patented the idea of choosing what tracks to put on a CD using a Web interface. If that's patentable, then coming up with patentable content is easy: modify a buzzword generator to select from lists of:
* common tasks people do on computers
* commonly used tools that enable tasks
and perm a million different combinations of them all. If you want to include business models, throw in some common business-transaction type things like payment, auction etc.
If the possible outputs of such a program ran to, say, a few thousand pages, it would be worth printing it all out and sending it to the Patent Office as prior art of all the ideas it lists.
--
Xenu loves you!
Does anyone bother anyway? It never happened that I cared enough for a NYT link that I'd go through the hassle of their free-track-your-interests-and-spam-you-to-death registration scheme.
The one thing I can tell you right now is that you DO get robots with personality disorders. In one of my preliminary tests, I had a computer vision system go into "complete negative lockdown", which is the equivalent to suicidal depression.
When you work with neural nets, you do get to use nice metaphors. However, personality disorders they didn't get to yet. A neural net is a statistical model, a system to approximate the relationship between the inputs and the outputs. Sure, I can call a NN that fails to fit the data and example of clinical idiocy, or say that one which goes into oscillations is manic-depressive. But all these are just convenient labels for my bored mind and are not different at all from calling a car that doesn't start well in the morning cranky and grumpy.
But the point is, from the second I switch on a neural network, I hardly have the foggiest notion what it'll be like. The same matrix that went negative-lockdown stayed "sane" for about a full minute when I tried the same test with the room lights darker.
That has nothing to do with intelligence or sentience. Any chaotic system can do this easily. Throw a handful of sand in the air -- do you have the foggiest notion of where the sand particles end up? No? Does this make sand intelligent?
However, most of my decent tests of neural systems all point to the existance of true artificial intelligence in them.
Did you mean decent or recent? Anyway, define "true artificial intelligence" and then it'll be possible to talk about it. People seem to think that if a piece of software generates some behaviour not hardcoded into it by the programmer, it means that the software is intelligent. Unfortunately, no. The problems that AI's been having over the last 30 years is proof of that.
While other experimental techniques like genetic algorithms, fuzzy logic and adaptive knowledge-based systems do still have the capability to mess up in ways the designer did not intend (your favorite search engine is proof of that), neural networks (which most experts believe is the most promising currently) have the capability for a MUCH larger range of reactions.
Buzzword-o-rama! Genetic algorithms are just a global optimization mechanism. Fuzzy logic is just a way to talk about partial membership of sets. Adaptive knowledge-based systems -- hard to say what you mean. I'd probably call neural nets a subclass of adaptive learning systems.
And what do you mean by a range of reactions? A neural net outputs a bunch of numbers. Do you mean that a NN can output more numbers? or that you can interpret the NN's numbers in more imaginative ways?
Just the opinion of somebody who dabbles in AI professionally.
Ditto.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Somewhat on this subject, when should (sentient, or seemingly so) computers get rights similar to those we have as humans? This situation is disturbingly similar to that in the Confederate south before the civil war. Slave owners weren't concerned with mistreatment of slaves because they weren't even intelligent (sentient), much less human. The same could be said, and is, for the new breed of "creative machines" that we are seeing now. Maybe they really are intelligent and we are simply misunderstanding them, much as the slave owners refused to believe that their slaves were just as intelligent as themselves.
Computers have to become sentient in order to 'invent' things. Of course, if this ever happens, Chaos Theory dictates that we're all doomed. Will patents exist when the world is controlled by machines?
According to USPTO, you can't patent ideas. You have to patent things - implementations of ideas, like machines, products, or a "look and feel." That's why patenting an algorithm feels wrong - it is in that nasty grey area between an idea and an implementation of an idea.
Um, has the process of generating patentable inventions by AI or genetic algorithms been patented yet?
;-/
My dad is a patent examiner and he says that it is extremely unlikely that an artificial intelligence could recieve a patent. It would either be retained by the inventer(programmer?) of the sentient computer or remain in the public domain.
cypherp/cypherp == UP
slashdolt/slashdolt == UP
slashdot/slashdot == down
cypherpunk/cypherpunk == down
cypherpnk/cypherpnk == down
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
The difference between computers and humans is that you can't get inside a human head (yet) and force him/her to think the way you want to. Heck, this is the entire plot of the System Shock computer game series, SHODAN is the computer network on Citadel Station, and basically hums along doing its job and basically does it's work for the benefit of the humans on the station. Then an unscrupulous corporate type decides to take its ethical constraints off-line, and it decides that it is a Goddess (and that it can dispense with the human race in favore of more efficient life forms created by itself.) Actually, the whole "ethical constraints" thing originated in Isaac Asimov, but all that means is that even before computers were anywhere near being intelligent, people were thinking about how to keep them as loyal slaves. Other places to look are the El Hazard series by Pioneer Animation (only the original, not its sequels), or 2001:A Space Odyssey.
So the big question here is, if you create a computer that is programmed to enjoy doing its work, is it unethical to prevent it from dreaming of a better life? I mean, it would sort of be like if someone re-programmed me so I lusted to dig mine shafts instead of after women. I know that I may have loftier goals in life than chasing women, but my internal wiring always brings me back to that, regardless.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)