AI Is No Longer About Tomorrow. Here’s Why

The world has been excited — or fearful, depending on who you ask — about the potential of artificial intelligence for years now. Many of humanity’s biggest names have either been hyping it up or actively investing in it for years. It’s been our generation’s premier “technology of tomorrow.”

Well, guess what? Tomorrow is here. And it has been for some time.

AI is no longer merely a subject of marketing speak or media speculation. It’s already changing the way we do business across industries — it’s utilized by financial services companies to serve clients better and recognize fraud; by healthcare providers to more accurately diagnose illness and identify more effective treatments; by product makers to keep machines up and running and to streamline supply chains; and by urban experts to follow and moderate local challenges, like traffic, contamination, and crime.

Today, AI is just about everywhere.

In fact, at Skylum, we heavily rely on AI technologies in our products, too. We use it to automatically enhance photos and make the editing process more seamless for our users. Our goal with the AI-powered technologies is simple: let artists create beautiful photographs with minimal effort.

In essence, we’re using AI technologies to give people and professionals across the world more of their time back. And this exemplifies why AI is so exciting — and why it isn’t something people should fear. There’s so much good it can do for humanity.

Here are just a few things it’s already equipped to do today.

1) It simplifies our work and empowers us with more knowledge.

AI technologies can simplify our lives and save us time. Think of how spell-checking simplifies the task of writing reports or essays, or how automatic transmissions simplified the task of driving.

Now, the amount of work relative to a task which computers can complete varies. Sometimes computers will finish entire tasks on their own; sometimes they’ll cut our work in half.

But consider the real-world use cases. Teachers today can use machine learning to analyze test results and help identify gaps in student knowledge. Law firms, meanwhile, are increasingly using machine learning to process the huge amounts of data and documents they’ve historically processed manually.

More generally, AI technology that allows us to automate certain menial elements of our jobs needs to be embraced for this reason alone: it makes our lives easier.

2) It accelerates the speed with which we complete our work.

Similarly, AI empowers humans to solve problems faster.

By outsourcing our work with machine learning, we automate elements of our work that proved major time-sucks in the past — something the photographers using Skylum exemplify perfectly.

For example, the AI Sky Enhancer — one of the smart filters in Luminar — eliminates the need to use masking on a photo to make the sky stand out. Instead, you can use just one slider and get “wow!” results in mere seconds. This can save you up to 5 minutes of editing for one photo. Just imagine if you had a hundred more to go.

3) It frees us to spend more time working on the things we actually like doing.

Finally, by simplifying our work and by increasing the speed with which we’re able to accomplish tasks, AI ultimately allows us one even more crucial benefit:

It frees us up to focus on more enjoyable and important tasks.

Our AI technologies at Skylum empower photographers to spend less time editing at home and more time to go out and take great photos. Search engines that learn how to better serve users empower writers to spend less time researching in libraries and more time writing prose. When teachers today grade and process student test scores using machine learning, thisdrastically reduces the amount of time they need to spend grading (something they typically have to do at night, during what should be leisure time).

These examples, of course, are just the tip of the iceberg. The power of machine learning technology continues to increase, which means the impact AI technology is already having on our happiness, productivity, and quality of life will only increase, as well.

It’s for this reason that we shouldn’t fear AI, but embrace it.

AI will make our lives easier. It will make humans happier and more capable. These are simple facts.

Now, another truth is that people fear change. We were once wary of television, airplanes, and smartphones. But here’s the thing: we now embrace all these kinds of technology as normal components of our lives. So, too, will we accept and embrace machine learning. The difference is, this is technology we’re teaching every day to serve us better, and we’re doing so right now.

It’s hard to fathom the positive impact this will ultimately have.