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Tasks surprisingly easy to automate

Art. Since the early 2000s, the University of London's The Painting Fool program has created artwork, much of which has been featured in prominent galleries alongside human-created art. Neural networks such as DeepStyle or Prisma use convolutional neural networks to stylize photos after the work of a specific artist. Logo generation systems like Withoomph, Tailor Brands, and Logojoy, use partially- or fully-automated systems to generate logos based on keywords.

Researchers have also applied these processes to music: Melomics is a system that composes and plays music to match your lifestyle and activities, and IBM has partnered with artists to help compose music with Watson by combining massive musical datasets and their lyrics with sentiment analysis. It appears that natural human creativity is not, in fact, necessary to create beauty.

Science/research. A core basis of science is reproducibility. Companies such as OpenTrons are working to save scientists both time and money by helping them automate pipetting, a monotonous and labor intensive task used in many laboratories. Startups Arcturus and BioRealize enable scientists to remotely run many genetic engineering experiments in parallel, greatly reducing mistakes and lab time. Other startups, such as Emerald Therapeutics and Transcriptic, are hoping to move research to the cloud, using remote robotic systems to perform the experiment itself.

Beyond automating manual lab work, machines are now automating scientific discovery and understanding. Nutonian is a Cornell spinout that creates models on data without being given any prior assumptions. Researchers at Cambridge, Aberystwyth, and Manchester have created a similar autonomous science algorithm that they claim was the first machine to independently discover new scientific knowledge. As the pace of scientific research increases, scientists may increasingly rely on automated systems.

Legal. The practice of law requires many years of studying and understanding laws, cases, and other legal precedence. Recent advances in AI have made the automation of those tasks possible; to date, case law, contract law, and advocacy law have seen the most automation. Startup DoNotPay helps users appeal traffic tickets. ROSS Intelligence augments legal research by using AI to surface relevant legal passages and cases to increase the efficiency and quality of legal research. eBrevia uses AI to extract data from contracts to accelerate diligence, contract analysis, and other related applications.

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