Excerpt from, The Prophetic Backbone, now available at amazon.com in the kindle store.

The issue today with internet-of-things (IoT) home products and healthcare wearable devices concerns our need to change one behavior after another. We're then consciously reevaluating human nature. Simply stated, internet-of-things technologies must be  marketed behaviorally; sensors bring biological or psychological value to each person uniquely but at the same time, connect us into unknown networks. When sensors are implanted or worn, users attain knowledge from their data and evaluate themselves according to comments and opinions from owner communities. We are assimilating bio-sharing into healthy behaviors that are highly tuned to privacy. To share, and to believe we should share everything, is a new behavior. We now proudly wear a smart watch and begin “sharing” immediately. The product is designed to initiate a new behavior. As for home IoT appliances, these do nothing more than generate data about mechanical reliability, environmental quality and even real-time feedback to a manufacturer’s customer support, likely a bot. These too, like wearables, are fundamentally driven with ideological stimulus, to say, you’re smart if you’re connected and non-intelligent if you aren’t. The subtle social marketing thrust to integrate IoT products into your life is that sharing live data relieves you of being labeled non-intelligence. You’re becoming futuristic one behavior at a time while the skeptics become less socially relevant. Technology is your sixth sense and although virtuous for a time, does not carry any logical comparison to humans’ five senses, intuition and intelligence.

We are in a technology revolution but we are also experiencing a prophetic movement - all human behaviors, say technologists, such as trust, love and hate or empathy, will one day be machine-replicable so as to enable computers to associate “personhood” with a bio-data profile. We're on such a path.

​Robert P. Waters, Author 2018

From: The Prophetic Backbone by Robert P. Waters

Throughout the 2008-2012 Great Recession, scientific communities such as the National Institutes of Health reported almost daily about neurologic and genetic discoveries while corporate marketers began to shadow such awe-inspiring findings. Also in the private sector, training and skills development ideas were experiencing a revolution of their own: to replace and not to re-train. In a new best practice HR landscape, to replace meant that a completely new assessment theory could lead the way. The real hiring context was that tech developers would begin developing technologies to replace themselves as employees. From the shadows came the prophets seeking their disciples. Medical communities went about treating people; big business went about replacing them.

What the big tech firms said and actually did was resolved by acquiring nothing more than excessive personal data. They put HR on a spinning wheel: when universities substantiated theories about brain-to-personality traits, software vendors would upgrade their products with the latest revelations. Concluding that behavioral data was producing something beneficial to society, corporations turned the spotlight on their workforces to find smart “science proven” people for the digital future. They were measuring but they were not mentoring.
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They could program a robot but they risked lost time and resources when training people. Predictive AI, instead became high value over the human value; the shadow, the representation of innovation evolving beyond brain theories. Finally, an acceptable new science would learn to expose the algorithmic activist; an employee who could disrupt. HR has never looked back.
​RPWaters @2018

LinkedIn has changed over the past few years in that, social expression of the sorts found on Facebook are being placed here between business topics. Interestingly, LinkedIn human experience posts elicit hundreds of comments. A few arousing topics are hiring, firing, recruiting, workplace behaviors and robots replacing people. Nothing, however, prepares us to talk about a massacre. My post is about Parkland, Florida but more directly, the business of teaching. Teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School are returning to a work life forever changed. A once-normal school must be put back together by a traumatized work force. Like each one of us, they return to their jobs - except nothing for them is the same as before.
Trauma is the reversal of an expected and intentionally planned-for outcome. The plan for February 14th was teaching students to develop knowledge; the outcome was death. I’m sure many reading this have worked with a co-worker experiencing trauma due to an unexpected incident in life. People DO come to work dealing with trauma. I wonder if teachers and school administrators in Florida will ever view their professions the way they did pre-February 14th. It's not just one  person but, the entire school system trying to function normally in an abnormal, unfamiliar new world.  
Teachers need their local community to encourage and support them, even on normal days. Their business touches all of our lives.
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