Blog Posts

Genetics Tossed into Corporate Narratives

2/9/2018

From: The Prophetic Backbone, by R.P. Waters

*re-posting following the news of a Chinese scientist announcing the genetically changed embryos that created twin baby girls.

"Science" is becoming synonymous with science fiction largely due to media sources writing about future humans, for better or for worse. There's increasing science friction in all this; the concern that some tech company really will create alter-humans. A genome editing technology like CRISPR has gained recognition as a leap discovery, taking genomics beyond just another iteration – and unless one is keeping up with Twist Bioscience, the NHGRI or the GA4GH, it’s admittedly hard medical science to understand. What do non-scientific medias resort to most often? Behaviors! The actions taken by each person in uncountable ways and situations; they are less complex to digest. Even tech media qualifies genetics as a science within behaviorism and report on researchers who are leading in the discovery of behavior-associated genes. No soul, no human will, no choice or conscience, no religious truths – just behavior genes driving behaviors. This is what happens when genetics gets tossed in with corporate narratives and “disruption” becomes their goal.
The NIH has a clear mission to research numerous diseases and their causes, establish labs, set up cohorts, test theories and advise on marketplace applications. Then, flip the coin and we see one House of Representative leader from North Carolina and the American Benefits Council promoting H.R.1313, a bill to override all employee protections where genetic data could be made available to a health management firm. The bill is in three committees and opposed by hundreds of organizations. The result most likely in corporate: bio-discrimination. Bio data will be just another form of business data. There's no CEO or HR professional who has a clue what a genome means much less what to do with it. Disruption? How about deception?

Here’s the friction in the science fiction: we have technology developed to improve human health. As corporations merge with science entities, their branding genetically altered behaviors or human beings is a friction we should fight against.

robertpwaters.com
The Prophetic Backbone is forthcoming in 2019 as an eBook

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The Behavior of Marketing: Marketing Behaviors

1/21/2018

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From: The Prophetic Backbone
Many, including this author, do not oppose innovation; more accurately, we challenge universal behavioral changes promised when innovations are being introduced through marketing narratives. And, for reasons never clearly defined, the brain is synonymous with behaviors. So, although the brain is a well-researched biological structure with many parts, yet, the way thoughts are produced infinitely and that tech-scientists believe that thought is a quantifiable property - it can, therefore, be scientifically reproduced as digital– this is their technological quest. A physical product such as a smartphone, has a short life. Behaviors, through conditioning, result from people using the product which marketing announces in science fiction-like rhetoric: buy now, live the future. The future includes “quantified self.”
The 1950’s car buyer did not share his car with friends and followers but the smart products of today indicate the pathway to social engagement and self-validation: share your personal product's data. Go to the future with everyone, don't go alone. Share your heart rate and sleep patterns and workout regimen? Give Google and the NIH your genome? Yes; now we see the behavior of marketing that is marketing behaviors. Marketing has taken on a dual role in that, once a product’s key benefits are categorized for re-aligning our personal lifestyle or organization, a secondary pronouncement from some individual of importance within the firm comes to the media saying that their product will change behaviors held by all society.

from: The Prophetic Backbone by R.P. Waters, an eBook on amazon.com
visit robertpwaters.com

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Bad Behaviors need Disrupting

1/10/2018

I read an IBM study claiming 69% of CEO’s think disruption is an opportunity. Enabling and investing in exploration of the human brain is likewise worth every CEO’s attention. The most vocal technologists have already envisioned their future and for the rest of us it comes down to this: people should begin to think about changing their behaviors as big tech firms go about disruption. For instance, when promoting autonomous cars they promise safety benefits but marketing is presenting one key sociological benefit: you’re buying the future. That means discarding behaviors and adopting new ones. Structured driving will save lives according to all predictions although no proof exists.
The 2016 National Highway Traffic Safety site (NHTS.gov) stats show intoxicated drivers caused 10,497 deaths and total 2016 highway deaths at 37,461. Such bad behaviors are linked with 19th century car technology. I can find very little about specific U.S. road infrastructure changes at NHTS which may enable autonomous cars to operate more safely than today’s cars. Anyway, technologists say it's about behaviors.

When you think about it, the Titanic rolled out of dry-dock in Belfast and nothing at all changed; the infrastructure was the ocean. When consumer drone ownership took off and then commercially, it was all about sharing the big sky “infrastructure” with the airlines. Now the FAA requires drone registration and a remote pilot certificate due to early-on bad behaviors resulting in privacy and safety regulations. U.S. highway infrastructures are outdated. When autonomous cars finally arrive they will operate like new ships on old oceans. The "ocean problem" demands acknowledging that not every environment is 100% disruptable. Nor is it easy predicting how the environment, our brains and yes, highways, will respond to man's disruptions.
from: The Prophetic Backbone, by R.P.Waters

Digital Predestination

11/20/2017

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From: The Prophetic Backbone
* eBook at amazon.com/author/robpwaters

WHERE businesses resist ethical statutes limiting gateways into the wide fields of bio-sciences – there our societal battles will persist until resolved by laws. Ethical accountability seems to be a wait-and-see movement when trying to keep AI and genetics from pushing us over the edge. And, we must have one or the other – laws and ethics or accept digital predestination. Predestination is biblical; Charles Darwin's evolution theory is theory.
Accepting digital predestination would then easily pinpoint time of discovery of physical, electrical and mechanical properties in computer system's logic. All discoveries are recent, not ancient time. Having progressed to the moment when creating a biological-digital human being seems likely, today, such pre-futurists-technologists assume their status as “creator”. Their imaginations, however, may be evolving faster than what biological bodies can adapt to and ethical laws be written to constrain. Yet, if the tech prophets can put the burden of unrealized, yet unknown human-like creations on the artificial intelligence technology - then their societal dilemma is resolved. So, the questions of our time have become,

> Were we destined to create a part human - part digital species?
> Will digital predestination, like our genomes, truly express a new nature from created human life?

As I have elaborated, the Prophetic Backbone will be a network specially constructed to manage & control digitalized, artificial beings – part human part silicon, having synthetically re-designed genomes. We'll have to decide if Melvin Kranzberg was correct when he wrote his First Law of Technology, 'technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral'. This time, it's different.
from: the last chapter of The Prophetic Backbone. They may claim the future but eternity has been claimed

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