Letters to the Editor
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May their knowledge be the first to be transferred ...
... to a Filipino wizkid who'll do their job for pennies.
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Oy, AI?
Tech patents are being more broadly written to try and head off any competition, it seems. See the UNIX brouhaha. But what is described here sound a lot like what was being used as the rationale for AI (Artificial Intelligence) a decade or two ago; Collecting and storing knowledge of experienced workers so it can be transferred to incoming workers (or as a disaster recovery schema should the experienced worker die or, heaven forfend, leave the company). Then there was a thought (pun intended) that it could also be used in non-human interactions as well. Give that "knowledge" to a machine to perform the tasks humans do and...well, we are still waiting for most of the benefits claimed for that idea.
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It's already been said, but...
... that "knowledge transfer" used to go from senior engineers to junior ones, aka new college grads. Usually over the cube wall in the same office.
What will we do when all the senior US engineers retire, and there are no new college grad engineers who've grown up to take their places?
We can't assume that "our" engineers will naturally be better just because they live here. Engineers, or any highly skilled professional, are grown through a career of experience. What will we do when all those engineers don't live here any more?
Just asking.
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What exactly was patented?
It sounds like they just patented the concept of on-line training. Radical idea . . . .
Perhaps I'll join the fun and patent "a hardware appliance for full-time data protection, storage, indexing, and retrieval."
A book cover, in other words.
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You can't patent this
It's called a memo. There is prior art.
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let me see if i get this
Some kind of proprietary distance learning technology has become a metaphorical soda straw through which I drink your milkshake--or maybe you drink mine, but the sucking sound has at least been clearly identified as originating from a metaphorical milkshake. (What's my prize for incorporating the latest catch phrase?)
Seriously, any kind of "rapid transfer of knowledge" that doesn't involve sticking stainless steel domes on people's heads and pulling an oversize knife switch is not patentable in my world. When are these kids going to learn?
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I'd love to chalenge this one
True confession. I am a patent attorney.
I scanned the file history for the app and it took a long torturous route to approval. A previous patent (U.S. 6,471,521) "System for implementing collaborative training and online learning over a computer network and related techniques" stood in the way. And that's just what the examiner turned up. I'm sure lots of companies, like IBM, have long fielded capabilities that would invalidate this patent.
Regardless, if they dared use this patent for anything more than leverage or a fairly low license fee, I doubt their case would last much past the Markman hearing. That's when the court decides exactly what each term and limitation in the claims actually means.
I've been getting a lot of business lately challenging patents and providing infringement opinions.
fun, fun
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This is too broad to be patentable
When you strip away all of the gobbledegook, what you are left with is that the Patent Office granted a patent for a company to create an internet-based database which compartmentalizes parts of a website containing certain tasks for assigned workers to perform.
The problem is that this process is neither unique nor even rare. Tons of internet-based companies do precisely this, and have been doing it for years. It isn't new, there is no special technology involved, and about the only thing truly unique about it (apart from the garbled nonsense words used to describe it) is the specific programming code which they happened to write when they set up their own system. And considering that there are only so many ways of reinventing the wheel, that is just not enough.
The upshot of all this is simple:
CONCEPTS ALONE SHOULD NOT BE PATENTABLE.
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Vapid Transfer of Knowledge
Specifically, transferring knowledge from "experts" in one location to "apprentices" in another, via a Web-based set of templates.
Oh, man. That gives me a workplace flashback from the late 1990s, when at a job I had at the time, the head administrator corralled me one day and said "Take everything you know, every aspect of the work you do, and put it into a manual so that a complete idiot could pick up that manual, read it, and do your job."
I thought "What kind of Taylorist bullshit is this?" So, what I did was make a training manual that looked like it explained how to do my job if somebody who didn't do my job looked at it, but which was actually useless if somebody actually relied on it as a training manual. Nobody trained me, so why should I give somebody a roadmap to the work I'd done, just so "a complete idiot" could take my place?
The Net rules, but there's something truly Huxley-scary about this kind of online knowledge transfer scheme. Knowledge workers exposed to this kind of Accenture crap should try to work it so they get ongoing consultant gigs to help them explain the work you're doing, rather than having them just write you out of the process with a line of code. It's amazing how management will listen to consultants when they won't listen to their own employees.
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Metaphorshake
They will not suck our milkshake down to the gurgly, bubbly bottom. The knowledge will flow only until their level is the same as ours. (We need to weight this metaphorical milkshake, somehow, for lower wages and other factors, but the analogy holds up.)
When the global milkshake knowledge ocean reaches an even global sea level, our American milkshake ships will begin to float up again, along with theirs, as more of the milk of human knowledge rains down. If they ever get ahead of us, their milk will wash back to us.
I believe we are much closer to this equilibrium time than most of us realize. Look at foreign investment in the USA. Detroit, Michigan is ready right now to become a cheaper offshore assembly location for foreign enterprises. As soon as the foreign enterprises really begin to thrive, we will get more milkshake.