The recent news regarding whether AI can or cannot be 'invetors' causes an issue. If companies cannot profit (getting patents) from finding new inventions such as drug discoveries, less effort and money will be put into AI to do such things.
A possible solution to this problem would be to reduce the number of years for which a company can hold a patent before becoming available for anyone in the public domain. Current patents tend to range from 15-20 years. However if laws were passed allowing AI companies to obtain shorter duration patents on what their AI discover it could be a Win win.
The companies still pursue AI discoveries/inventions as there is a profit motive, but they are limited to say 5 years, therefore shortening the amount of time until these inventions hit the free market leading to price drops and broad availability.
And I think this makes sense as future AI's could theoretically pop out multiple useful inventions per year, where as many human inventors would be lucky to get 1 'big hit' in there entire lifetime.
Tldr: Humans brains are slower therefore they get long patents. AI brains fast, therefore they get short patents.
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