On the eve of standing down as national president of the International Cinematographers Guild, IATSE Local 600, Steven Poster ASC says education, development, and standardisation remain crucial as a new age of technology dawns.

For the last thirteen years I've had the honour to serve as president of the International Cinematographers Guild, our industry's trade union. And every month of that time I wrote the lead editorial for our magazine. I am now transitioning out of that honoured position hopefully to return to my work as a cinematographer and to teach. I will still continue to be a fierce advocate for the art and craft of our beloved profession, and for our position, within the world of rapidly changing and expanding technology.

I thought I would share my last editorial as president with you, my colleagues and friends at the BSC and the readers of British Cinematographer Magazine.

Last month we talked about new technology in a way that reminded us of the exponential change that's occurring and the impact it's having in our workplace. In fact, when I first heard about two recent developments going on outside our industry, it just confirmed for me this all-pervasive age of new technology that is upon us.

The first was a 3D printing of a heart with real human tissues and vessels developed in Israel. It's not ready for prime time - yet. But it will almost certainly lead to the future creation of reliable and effective synthetic major organs that can be implanted in human beings. The concept alone is amazing and reminds me of that old TV series The Six Million Dollar Man. It featured an astronaut, Colonel Steve Austin, portrayed by American actor Lee Majors, who, after his spaceship crashes and he is seriously injured, is rebuilt by scientists with machine parts to emerge, cyborg-like, with superhuman strength and speed. It's easy for many of us to conceive of a prosthetic hip or knee, of course; but a dynamic major organ like a heart that's built via technology, to me, says we are now living out what was once called 'science fiction'.

The next thing I saw actually made me feel a bit queasy about where science and technology are headed. Organic robots are part of a new field called "soft robotics," in which machine beings are created that possess artificial intelligence and have a life cycle, much like human beings. They live, learn, and play with like-beings, and when they come to the end of their life cycle, they die. The philosophical and ethical questions surrounding organic robots boggle the mind. I've been reading about such ideas since I was a teenager, in science-fiction novels. And, as we know, science fiction is usually based on some kind of technological idea or concept that is already in existence or is likely to show up on a drawing board very soon (there's an old concept).

Where these advances impact our industry is in the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Did you know that Apple recently bought a Danish computer vision company called Spektral? The start-up specialises in creating real-time greenscreen technology via machine learning AI (artificial intelligence). That means, one day very soon, our iPhones will be able to create composite imagery without the greenscreen technology we're all so accustomed to. Ditto for a company in Mountain View, CA, called Arraiy, whose DeepStudio uses machine learning and computer vision to combine the virtual and real worlds. The core attribute of DeepStudio is something called "neural networks," which, when combined with cameras and computer programming, can learn a given scene with 99.999 percent accuracy. With game engine drivers, CGI and physical elements are comped in realtime, carrying huge implications for our workplace.