Samiam’s Scribble Pad

June 24, 2017

The robots are coming to take your jobs… welcome to last century.

There has been a lot of hype in the press about the advent of artificial intelligence being able to automate away jobs.
The thing is that if I was in the job of being a bullock driver delivering sacks of wheat, or a schooner sailor doing the same. I really ought to think about my career options.
In my own careers I have seen and even been responsible for automation reducing the labour force.
The first example was in my previous career in Molecular Biology. I got my first break in the field helping out a wonderful woman Michelle Walker. She worked partime in the JCW lab at the Uni of Adelaide. She was pregnant with her second child and as a result she couldn’t work with the radio isotopes that you use to sequence DNA. Namely phosphorus thirty two attached to adenosine tri phosphate, nothing that nasty a beta emitter with a half life of 30 days. But while you have child onboard it isnt worth taking the risk.
Anyway Michelle and John Cronan trained me up how to sequence DNA. You need to understand what you are doing, but in the end its not much more complicated than cleaning glass and mixing up reagents like baking a chocolate cake. It does have a certain amount of craft for getting it right. Bubbles between two layers of glass separated by 0.3 mm filled with a liquid poly acrylamide solution with a reagent that will harden in a few minutes makes it tricky. Needless to say after your twentieth run you get good at pouring gels. timing of the polymerase reaction and stopping it with the four letters of the genetic code, and putting them in the correct order in the lanes of the gel. On top of being careful with the hot (radioactive) reagents.
I did all this on a volunteer basis so I could get lab experience, because we were in the middle of the recession that we had to have and I had yet to graduate.
Anyway sequencing DNA was a laborious process taking about 6-12 hours of fairly specialised labour to get about six hundred base pairs of DNA sequence. Given that we were sequencing the genomic DNA of yeast for pyruvate carboxylase, this is the dead parts of the DNA sequence that dont make the enzyme as well as the important bits that do. It could add up to hundreds of hours of work.
Lets fast forward three short years later. I graduated from Honours from the same JCW lab, and got a gig with Prof Peter Hoj, out at the Waite Campus. I had cloned some modified genes into a bacterial plasmid and it was time for sequencing. So I was all ready to go clean the glass mix up my reagents and get busy doing some DNA sequencing to confirm that I got what I thought I had made with the mutagenesis of a Barley gene.
This is where the automation kicks in. We dont do our own sequencing any more, we send it to another central service which uses a machine, and you get back the sequence on a floppy disk, perfect 1200 base pairs, done by a machine.
So to summarise, Sam the DNA sequencer gets replaced by a machine.
OK onto another career. I worked on a sequence on Harry Potter six, the Half Blood Prince. I was working as a lighter on the room transformation. The sequence has about forty animated props, the plate, the actor, a match move for the actor, the lighting as a 360 lat long image. Nothing that complex by today’s standards. But this is back on a 32 bit machine where you can only access 4Gb of RAM at a time. Lighting this shot use to take quite a process. I would calculate the ray traced passes in advance, stored them on disk as a sequence of images, and then look up those images as a cache of the calculations, to overcome the memory limitation of the computer, this process was done by me by hand each time the shot was run. Along with splitting it up into passes, foreground, background etc. Hold out for the actor. So each time the animation would update it would take me about 4 hours of jiggery pokery to run the rendering calculation on a bank of computers called the render farm. A lot of skill was required to memorise all the steps involved.
Fast forward 7 years, now we have automated the lighting process. Building a new version of animation could take 2 minutes to build and be submitted onto the farm. Meaning you can work on about ten times the amount of shots as a lighter as you could seven years ago.
So to summarise automation reduced the amount of labour required in the computer graphics industry.
The bit that I left out is I am responsible to make sure that we can get the most out of the automation of the production of computer graphics. That is my job, I make the robots that are coming to take away your jobs.
Anyway if I was a truck driver at the moment I would be considering that the shots in the movie Logan of the autonomous trucks on the highway are a sign of the future. Dont fret. It happened to the schooner sailor in the wheat belt of South Australia some time ago. I am sure they found something else productive to do.

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