Robert P. Waters
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Hands off: My wheel

1/11/2019

 
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By all appearances in story after story, week after week, the media taps into corporate PR and Marketing jockeying back and forth trying to win America’s heart for electric cars or autonomous cars. Will the benefits lean in favor for the environment, consumers, manufacturers, insurers, politicians or to each with variation?  It is appropriate to think about losing human cognitions when new technologies shift a phenomenon to a new idealism. The phenomenon is that the vehicle loaded up with computing systems actually moves the car in a direction under known conditions and in test environments. Will it kill the dog instead of the blind man in the crosswalk? – we don’t know exactly. Will it go to a location loaded with a bomb or could special sensors disable the vehicle? – we don’t know. When questioning deeply one should never be labeled a Luddite, alarmist or populist as one Washington D.C. think tank, the ITIF, is so adept at.  Everything is learned from the day we are born, every skill has a conception, then a memory learning process. 
We’ve driven automobiles for one century but in the next decade will require a cognitive adaptation experience which is about becoming an extension of a vehicle.  The future car needs several systems to operate; we give up personal information to co-operate.  The obvious is location data in the GPS, radar and mapping functions. We can be talking to a virtual assistant that uses a network ID. There will be a live bio-feed on the “drivers” attentiveness, pulse rate, his time in vehicle. Ownership will begin by importing his driving record, insurance and quite realistically, his public records such that when charged as a sex offender, is computer-warned to avoid school zones. The driverless car also integrates a driver’s private record much like a health record or HR background report because the car manufacturer owns their vehicles’ multi-softwares in the same way Microsoft owns Office 365. Their software must apply security which demands personalization for updates and bug fixes. The car, then, is really more like a co-sharing agreement between manufacturer and buyer due to numerous computer systems making it autonomous. 

Technological disruption and cognitive skills do have a correlation: the greater the disruption the more time it will take to believe in benefits without fear of losing personal freedom and, if there is one product that has fully delivered on the value of freedom, it is the automobile. 

Robert P. Waters
@2019
from: The Prophetic Backbone


All Aspirations Have Adversaries

11/9/2018

 
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 From: The Prophetic Backbone - eBook
A 1950’s car owner did not share his car with friends or with an opt-in community, but smart products are implicit about enabling a pathway toward social ascension, intelligence and the perception of changing one’s genetics. What does this have to do with sharing? The behavior of marketing is about marketing behaviors, whether we're reading about autonomous cars or wearable tech: buyers can share highly personal metrics. And more; he can do this in community. A notable paradigm shift has occurred in advertising’s two bedrock behavioral toolkits; sociology and psychology, now superseded by psycho-neurology and challenged by genetics.
Social behaviors are challenging to quantify for marketers; that is, to apply finite numbers on immeasurable behavioral patterns and hundreds of subjective feeling orientations. Does it feel like we're in the age of the brain economy? 
Have I failed in stating the obvious?  Technologists creating the digital future are sold-out on behavioral replication through AI; AI being the lead technology for re-creating cognitions or patterns of learning, and memorization. Ah, but the false assumption: tech firms understand human conscience. And, better than in healthcare professions. But I must be cautious; they don't  really profess superior wisdom about human nature, it's their artificial intelligent software written by them making humans "shareable." Our cars, our homes, our mobility, our health, education, employment, our genomes.  Humanity has become exactly what the first scientists in AI from the 1960's-70's proclaimed we were: general information systems. Today, t
he tech prophets' personal triumphs will be nothing short of total human genomic re-engineering. 
All aspirations have adversaries. The battle is on to preserve the human race by trying to create a new one. Are we that "shareable?"
Robert Waters
author: the prophetic backbone, an eBook coming soon.

The Circus We Call Work

10/10/2018

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In May of 2017 The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus gave its final performance in New York City. For 147 years people were entertained around the world under the big tents until the financial problems increased as did animal rights activism. I started thinking about the Ringling Brothers during the current Federal Gov't shutdown. I've heard some commentators calling the crisis a "circus.”
With no further mention about what is happening or not happening on the Hill, I made a list of phrases we use in our work environment that have a direct link to the past joy, thrill and ever entertaining circus world, 147 years and counting:

​
Whose running this 3-ring circus?
I’m walking a tightrope around here
Our processes are like going through a ring of fire
I work with a bunch of clowns
Too much work. It's a juggling act
​I’m surrounded by lions
This department is a circus
A freak show!
My boss is a ringmaster
Get this monkey off my back
I’m jumping through hoops
Our proposal puts us in the center ring
 A merger! It's like being on a circus train
This job is like trying to ride two horses at one time
​The show must go on 

 
It’s a Barnum and Bailey world,
Just as phony as it can be.
But it wouldn’t be make-believe if
You believed in me

(It’s Only a Paper Moon, 1933)


Image: The Strobridge Litho. Co., Cincinnati & New York.
Library of Congress, Public Domain


Robert Waters
​2018/2025
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