I’m better now, much better, even if I can’t quite describe how.
 
Well, I know why I am better but first let me say, I haven’t been ill; there has been no recovery associated with my improved self.  I’m hoping my improvement is for the betterment of society, too. Yet, when I began posting details of my improvement on social media I received well-wishing replies, sincere questions about my prior health issues and happy emoticons.
 
Way back in 2018 I met with genetic counselors whose role was informing users of their services – notice I didn’t say “patients” because we aren’t patients – about the map of their entire genome. It was my decision based on their genomic sequencing service to knockout 4 of my 20,000 genes and to alter another 4 with disease-latency. I know what you’re thinking: my parents carried cancerous but latent genes associated with breast and brain tumors. Yes and no, sort of.  The counselors defined my account as fairly clean; it was rather, a 500 year historical relationship to African and Sub-Asian DNA that proved those cancers could activate inside chromosomes. Incredible fact of my DNA wouldn’t you say, here in 2028?
 
I’m better now with those latent genes altered and removed. I just wonder every day what the changes to me could do one day or even do to my kids and grandchildren. Still, I’m a better human now; feeling much better about myself.  And, I got a call from an ad agency to be in a TV commercial for a pharmaceutical firm. I was sorry to turn down their offer. The setting was a family picnic with happy dogs and old and young people on a lovely wheat farm – all the things I’m allergic to.

Robert Waters, 2018blog

I am not writing about technical “infrastructure” in autonomous vehicles for surely I'd be delving into algorithms, AI, sensors, radar, LiDAR, GPS – convergence technology on a platform known as a car. Reading a sampling of definitive statements on car company websites supported by the daily media about technology in autonomous cars, I see a perfect example of the grand leap model in innovation.
 
This psychological model plays to the public’s identity currently with one foot in the 20th century and the other in the 21st and maybe 22nd and 23rd centuries. Many find the new alternative to natural driving so alluring that they’ll leap right into a “sold” mentality when predictive social-oriented promises from Waymo, Uber, Hitachi, Tesla, Ford and VW hit the newsstand. Cognition; a driver’s ability gained through experience, must be shelved, put aside, de-commissioned for self-driven cars. How in the hell can psychology explain that?  It must be a true grand leap.
 
Psychologists know that stating a hypothesis only begins the real work of validation. Predictive behaviors sold as absolute foregone conclusions about autonomous car values such as guaranteed safety, better social welfare, a new life for senior citizens and stress-free living  are common. Car companies will tell us personal freedom and social intelligence are converging, to say; “I will trust (a behavior) computer systems to drive (a cognition) better than I can drive; I have become progressive and intelligent" (the leap). In addition to decommissioning cognition is the surrendering of privacy. Autonomous car systems tracks and stores data relative to performance, location and installed apps for passenger entertainment.
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The cognitive illusion comes by ceasing to critically think through the behaviors that we will de-commission. But there’s a more subtle behavior in some technologies grand leap model and that is to believe everyone else has accepted de-commissioning cognitions as well.
Robert P. Waters, Author

I should let you know that The Prophetic Backbone is not about the brain, so you can breathe a sigh of relief. You haven’t purchased another brain book; just a collection of observations about technologists of this day and age who believe the brain can be technology and more, replicated. The book also explains my challenging many grandiose predictions about future human existence declared by technologists that perpetuate even more predictions simply because it’s the in-thing as marketers compete for lead narratives about the future.
​Marketers create community in social media, always seeking variable behavioral data. I need to distinguish traditional consumer marketing data from consumers who reveal their bio-data in apps: one’s interests, shopping preferences, spend, locale, social influences and the like, qualify as primary data to guide marketers. Heart rate, work-out statistics, food caloric intake and comparative in-group data generated by health club members qualify in the nature of biological. We have always expected such data to be analyzed and secured by healthcare professionals. Something has changed: bio-data exposed through a mobile app is, by individual choice, roaming like wild horses out on a windy digital prairie where trackers and hackers stake their tents and wait for the endless caravans of digital load-bearers to pass by. There is nothing above or below the surface of your life desired more by digital landscape dwellers than your thoughts and subconscious quantified self. 
As technologies such as AI are employed to leap beyond evolution’s chronological limitations, perhaps a new  intelligent backbone network is being imagined somewhere between Silicon Valley and China.
from: The Prophetic Backbone, by RPWaters, 2018

excerpt from, The Prophetic Backbone
From a minimally structured experience – a drive down the road – to a computerized experience – here, one learned human cognition will surrender to technology and more, to the technology creator’s domain. Is it feasible, then, that humans became cognitively deficient when presented with driving a vehicle, say, 15 years after autonomous is standardized?  Not only in transportation, but in any work or activity replaced by computational data traversing some network. Ideology is present. If we can change humans, we should change humans, we will change humans. Technological disruption and cognitive traits do have a correlation: the greater the disruption the more time it will take to believe in benefits without fear of losing personal freedom. 
Talking about cognition, behaviors and computerized cars in the same sentence exposes the ideological underpinning which is to create a futureworld.  They have much more than a product sales pitch; it takes prophesy; meaning, the CEO proclaiming the future utopian reality.  We understand the word, “prophet” in the ancient world to be one who convicted people of conscious behaviors and actions that led to eternal judgment. Flip it. Today the technology prophets are saying their products will enable life; safer, disease-free, less human. The product is not the car, the robot, the IoT appliances or augmented reality. We are the products.  Many CEO’s are being led down a path where global enterprises will seek for global scale solutions from within  humans and less for them.  Artificial intelligence and machine learning infrastructures, still in conceptual design for most industries, are essentially stepping stones to human cognitive re-engineering.  An entirely new backbone network built as close to the human central nervous system as possible may introduce, as evolution was introduced by theoretical science, life-on-a-network material beings.

​Robert P. Waters, Author. 2018