GET PHYSICAL

MY old man stood up and cracked a joke about how I’d became a heartless ambulance chaser.

He’s never got over my transition from a child who loved writing childlike fables to an adult who tells more adult stories.

The “gentle kid” had become something else and he was here today to frighten the pants off everybody in the room. Dad sat down I stood up, grabbed the mic, pulled a slide deck from the cloud and said hello to 40-odd members of the Ocean Grove Probus Club and told them the end was coming. Not in so many words. My Dad’s in his eighties and he doesn’t really want to hear about the end coming.

It was a different kind of ending, I might have said, but didn’t.

Instead, I stuck to the topic of my choosing and hit them straight between the eyes.

“The rise of machine intelligence and why they want to know all about you,” the first slide said. Yeah, man. No more Mr Nice Guy. I’d broken loose from the confines of a print or web page and was having an encounter of the first kind with real people who actually wanted to know what the hell was going on. The tune and the lyrics were much the same as a regular reader might glean from this fortnightly creature of a column.

The robots were already here, scooping as much information as they could about you. *Click* See, here was Amazon opening retail stores that use video cameras and scanners rather than check-outs. *Click* A few days ago, they opened a Manhattan store that only stocks four-star and above products, as determined by their online shoppers. Your data at work.

They’ve trapped your mouse, now they want your voice.

Who doesn’t want a voice-enabled speaker that cheerily talks to you and records what you say? *Click* This (points to slide) is Amazon’s latest product release a few days ago of a voice-controlled microwave.

It still has all the usual buttons, but you can talk to it.

Who benefits most?

You or Amazon?

And where did your voice go when you said “Heat up my coffee”?

For my next trick, look at this slide about AI and how HR companies are using it to detect candidates lying in a job interview. And this one is about Disney scanning everyone in the cinema to see their reactions to scenes from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I scanned the room to see one or two people nodding off. I ploughed on. We talked about self-driving cars and the decisions these AI systems need to have programmed into them in the event of an accident. “An artificial intelligence, you see, needs to know what to do in an accident,” I said. “Who approved these decisions? “Did you agree with them? “Were they in the terms and conditions?”

“Why don’t we know about this?” someone asked, genuinely baffled. Well, we did know about it. It was there all the time. I hate to say it, but I think the news media has been pretty much asleep at the wheel for the past 20 years.

It’s partly because the smarts behind information technology is beyond the ken of most journalists who are more at home talking to people than interviewing mathematical models.

It’s partly because the public, too, prefers to be distracted or entertained than to spend much time on serious moral dilemmas.

So, the media gives the consumer what they want, not necessarily what they might need to know.

Except at the Ocean Grove Probus Club.

Here, I could tell an adult story, not a CSI fable which leaves no room for questions.

Here, I felt at home with my disquiet.

I then drove home to Geelong, thinking the answers won’t be found in an Amazon Echo or a Google search.

They’ll be found in the civil society of local people at the Ocean Grove Bowling Club. Peter Judd is newsroom operations manager for News Corp and a former editor or the Geelong Advertiser.