The river has been flowing through our city for ages and ages. Someone was always inventing a system or method to cross over. Since I was a child I’ve never seen a river where there is no bridge. 
 
This is metaphorically what many technology firms are facing with one distinction: as the river of natural human experiences flows ever onward, big tech keeps building more digital innovations whereby society must figure out how to cross each bridge to artificial, digitalized and silently coded futuristic ways of living.
 
Then mishaps, algorithmic errors, deaths, unexpected and unplanned things happen. Some bridges not only let good people cross over; the routes are utilized by bad people too, like state and nation cyber criminals. What can we do but frame digital innovation with ethics? right versus wrong, good vs bad, helpful vs hurtful, just vs unjust, imitation vs genius, bias vs inclusion.
A rational mode of ethical pursuit by technologists is to create many styles of bridges. High quality bridges for the wealthy, low-tech bridges for the poor, generic bridges for skeptics, renewable bridges for environmentalists. And, they also build bridges anywhere. A river isn’t necessary for a bridge to be built.  A bridge is progress, an invitation to journey - into my brain, my home, my children's lives, my past, my genome. And, my future.
 
You can see why big tech’s ongoing conundrum agreeing on ethics breaks down. They can’t agree on or decide at Google; they can’t decide at any big tech firm!  Transforming  humanity from our natural world of man+environment to their future world of genetically altered humans in genetically altered environments - is hard. The one side of the river doesn’t resemble the other. But until we understand their ideology, which is to accelerate human evolution through counter-natural devices can we fight for the right to be human-as-created. 

​Robert P. Waters
​The Prophetic Backbone. an eBook on amazon.com

All artificial intelligence is is data. That’s it. So when you’re stressed out about something and looking for answers, inevitably someone will tell you to gather your thoughts. They’re right.

You arrive to the office and things begin. You need AI to help support your thoughts; there’s a potential career-changing decision to be made while people in the room await a debate around your logic-of-things. You quickly run down to the data center, pull up a keyboard, put in your desired variables and hit, enter. The AI software generates a few predictive solutions you then share with everyone. The AI predicted what your thoughts couldn’t gather because of life’s severe distractions-people, climate change, news, D.C. politics, social media posts, etc., etc. Suddenly a team member blurts out exactly the response you predicted -  
“Let’s try to get more data. Disruption is key. We may have more bias but we’ll gain a bigger market.”
You try to gather your thoughts which are now questioning the AI. Hurriedly, you excuse yourself, run down to the data center and send out a query to the cloud. The AI software responds and you rush back to your team, all of whom are on their phones typing tweets, silently lulled into a non-thinking state. One person looks up and blurts, “Great intelligence, let’s get it over to our Organizational Psychologist and get some quantitative metrics before elaborating any cultural signals to upper management.”
“An appropriate pivot” says another.
Riding home you listened to a Fresh Air interview with author Bill McKibbon on his new book, ”Falter.” “OMG” you think to yourself; “Can our product upgrade reduce the human carbon cycle?” Gather your thoughts. What cultural signals are we talking about?

robertpwaters.com 
author: The Prophetic Backbone. Technologists Are Proclaiming the Future. Eternity is Proclaimed