On a winter day in 1986 at the University College London student canteen, I had a chat with a PhD candidate. "What's the theme of your thesis?" I asked casually. "Artificial intelligence." he solemnly replied.
In March 1991, I represented Hong Kong to take part in the World Intellectual Property Organization Worldwide Symposium on the Intellectual Property Aspects of Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University. I was gratified to witness first hand how consensus was arrived at regarding authorship of computer-generated works. Having learnt the context and the international norms, I accomplished my mission to reform the law of Hong Kong relating to copyright in 1997, addressing the potential challenge of artificial intelligence as well.
During my 2015-2016 travels to Japanese destinations, I interacted with robotic marketing representatives at car rentals, hotel lobbies and department stores. In winter 2016, on my way back to Hong Kong from the Shenzhen Court of International Arbitration, I had intellectual exchanges with other high-tech arbitrators regarding the current market demands on artificial intelligence.
Yesterday, through a friendly sharing of an APP embedded with artificial intelligence, I was pleasantly surprised that it could generate poetic lines in Chinese despite my intentional colloquial Cantonese input. Artificial intelligence recognizes no boundaries and I can think of ways to learn or get inspirations from it. And the APP has become my first 21st C computer game!