Generic discussion of creativity and intellectual property with no actionable leads

Creativity 309 ideas through patents, copyright, and trade secret is big business and combines to form the practice of ‘intellectual property. Societies with the best protection of intellectual property are often the most successful. The USA is the unassailed leader, with Asian countries rapidly catching up. Poor old Europeans have struggled with an almost unworkable patent system for nearly 30 years; a genuine Europe-wide patent only came into effect in 2013. Creativity in the economy is now extremely important, and nothing emphasizes the point more than the job market. During the 60s finding a job was easy. There was an almost unlimited range of mechanical jobs on offer. In the post-industrial age, almost all the mechanical jobs have gone. Today we need to be experts in a field, able to solve problems creatively. You can't expect to walk into a job and be profitably productive on the first day. Finding a job is harder and the cost of employing someone is greater. Why did we Evolve Creativity? Roger Penrose wonders why mathematical creativity evolved in humans since it only became useful in ancient Greece a few thousand years ago. He believes it must have been useful for something before this. But what? David Deutsch thinks creativity developed to allow one human to understand the thoughts of a fellow human being. We can't precisely communicate the ‘programs’ we run in our heads. We are unable to download a detailed thought and put it on a memory stick. He thinks our creative capacity developed to help us pass skills from one to another. The ability to paint and sculpt is an accidental by-product of this adaption. It's my view we evolved creativity to deal with new situations and puzzles in our daily lives. We use creative thought processes and ingenuity to come up with novel solutions for when we can't rely on programming or a store of rules. Otherwise, the very first unforeseen situation could kill us! Computer Creativity Humans find creativity difficult. It requires peace and quiet, detailed study and input of caffeine. How does a computer fare? I have argued that computers cannot be creative above the logic limit, so this does not preclude them from creating within the narrow confines of a particular solution space. But a human still needs to set the rules for this space. The level of creativity we should see from computers is convincing within HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015999