I think an only moderately complex system could make up random new ideas, just a little like mad-libs, then use crowdsourcing to find out what other people think of the idea.
Consider the automatic generation of oral insulin, a multi hundred billion dollar product.
“a _pill_ that works like _insulin_ using _Enteric fizzing powder_” Then the hundreds of humans that see each individual idea would do things like estimate the fiscal value (perhaps hundreds of billions) as well as if they would use it.
As far as I know, there is not an *automatic* producer of youtube ads whose sole purpose in making ads is to earn enough to make more ads. If that was created people would be constantly recruited to evaluate machine originated technology, and "do-er" humans would be attracted to the billions of dollars.
(just a note on Humira, 13 billion $ annual revenue, over 20 years that is $260 billion! I imagine an oral insulin to be possibly as popular.)-- beanangel, Nov 26 2017 Inventionizer (a website) Prior art to this and [MB]'s tool (much closer to the latter) [notexactly, Feb 03 2018] Humira is not an insulin. It is a humanized antibody used to treat inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. I know because I was one of the people who worked on it at an early stage. Also, the technology behind it has just gone off-patent.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Nov 26 2017 [mb] duly noted, and gosh am I embarrassed!-- beanangel, Nov 26 2017 As it happens, I wrote a phrase generator for subjects related to my own. If I run it, here are ten of its outputs:
Bacteria that evolve robots Recursive sequencers mimic 3-D printers DNA origami using ligase Make insects with silicon Genomic magnets Auto-replicating encryption Encrypt larger lenses with plastic Cell-specific movement Drone that edits microscopes Q-dot that generates molecules
Most of those are irredeemable garbage; three or four might bear some thinking about and one has already been done.
The program has a list of sentence structures (like "Noun-plural that transitive-verb noun-plural"), and a list of words of each type, chosen by me. It just picks a sentence structure and then drops in words from the lists at random. It normally displays each phrase for only one second, just enough to let you half-grasp it, thereby introducing another level of randomnity.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Nov 26 2017 While you were busy improving humanity's lot I wrote an automatic porn generator that did the same thing.-- beanangel, Nov 26 2017 Yeah, think I saw one of those pieces. It fell outside of my parameters though - Custard/banjo porn is just not my thing.-- normzone, Nov 28 2017 That one was so grainy I could not tell if it was a real banjo.-- bungston, Nov 28 2017 I once posted an idea that was very similar to this. It received a vigorous boning.-- Voice, Feb 04 2018 random, halfbakery