THE KNOWLEDGE CLUB
by T.L. Winslow (TLW)
First Edition: September 16, 1985
Second Edition: November 26, 1985
Third Edition: January 18, 1986
Fourth Edition: January 18, 1995
Fifth Edition: January 18, 2001
© Copyright 1985, 1986, 1995, 2001 by T.L. Winslow. All Rights Reserved. [email protected]
License:
This book may be freely distributed by electronic means,
such as electronic bulletin board systems, without further
permission of the author, as long as the work is transmitted
in its entirety without alteration or omission. Publication
in print form, diskette or CD-ROM duplication, requires
written permission of the author, and a royalty agreement.
This book describes the author's working master plan for the
infrastructure of the information economy of the 21st
century. The early editions were written before the rise of
the Net and the World Wide Web. The chaos now seen is just
what the author's plan could have prevented. Nobody
listened to the author on prior go-arounds. It is all the
more important to be listened to now.
The early editions described what could better be described
now as a World Wide Web whose Internet Service Providers and
data trunks were owned and operated by the government as a
public utility. Each person in society would have a
lifetime account to which debits and credits are kept by the
government. Those who produce knowledge products earn
credits. This replaces the old obsolete notion of
copyright. People are free to use or reuse any knowledge
item in their knowledge product because the government will
keep track of the use and handle the crediting and debiting
of intellectual property rights owners' accounts. This will
eliminate the need for most copyright criminal actions.
These credits are nothing less than electronic money, backed
by the government's full faith and credit. I call this
whole system the Knowledge Center System (KCS), and it will
form the basis of the knowledge economy of the state.
The author rejects the slogan that to keep cyberspace free,
the government shouldn't have anything to do with it;
government will always be with us, because we need its
police powers and court system as long as we will exist.
No, to keep cyberspace free we have to put it under the
protection of the law to the max. In the new knowledge
economy legal police powers are all that stand between
prosperity and chaos.
Like the PC, the advent of the WWW has not changed anything,
but only shown the need for the author's system. I guess
I'm advocating government seizure (compensated) of all ISPs,
like I advocate government seizure of the Microsoft
monopoly corporation, as bad as it might sound. The reason
is the very same that we don't let each property owner own
all the roads around their property and charge tolls;
streets are public property. This doesn't make me a
communist, socialist, or any other ist that you could label
me as; just an emonetarist, believing in sound electronic
money and a level commercial playing field. Way back in
the early part of the 20th century the government stepped
in and forced RCA to share its patent on the superhetrodyne
radio, else RCA would have grown to prevent the rise of IBM
or Microsoft. The government action against Microsoft is
based on the wrong attack; it should seek to make Windows
public domain because it is a public utility, then force
Microsoft to pay all or some of the money back to the
customers, who will then be free to buy something from some
other company.
Not that I'm trying to make every knowledge product bear a
price. The KCS will handle public domain knowledge products
as well, hopefully for free. In the long run I foresee all
knowledge products becoming public domain; even today's
copyright and patent law acknowledge this, so it's a matter
of public policy how and when, not if. But, before a
knowledge product becomes public domain, the creators should
have full government protection of their works, including
the right to sell them for money. I don't see any way the
existing Internet can ever do that. To this day most web
sites are simply afraid to charge for content, and this is
not for fear of not getting any paying customers, but for
fear of the virtually certain possiblity that their content
will be pirated on the lawless Net.
The idea was toyed with that the government can just police
ISPs like they do, say, meat packing plants, with either
on-site inspectors or special monitoring equipment. This
idea cannot work. The ISP is run for profit, meaning it
carries the minimum amount of hardware and software to
satisfy the customers. A KCS has to have a massive amount
of extra hardware installed to monitor knowledge products
for piracy. The government should have to pay for this, not
the ISP owner. But if so, why should the government need
the ISP? The government should just seize the ISP, after
compensating them, then substitute its own public owned
monopoly utility, perhaps after using some of the ISP's
equipment and software, perhaps not. Private enterprise
involvement or even ownership of parts of the KCS can be
tried, like with prisons, but that doesn't change the fact
of who ultimately finances and controls it. Sounds
draconian at first, but think about what the government
does to whiskey stills, do you miss them TV ads for
Home Whiskeymaker? Public safety is involved, right?
So you admit there is a purpose for government?
Can't ISPs be allowed to continue on even in the face of
a KCS? The question is not only why, but how? One could
imagine some electronic knowledge product authors authorizing
their work to be distributed outside the KCS, but how many
would want to do this, and even if they did, how would
they be able to turn to the government in case of suspected
piracy? The courts would likely rule that failure to use
the KCS for electronic knowledge items forfeits all legal
protections. The ISP could only be permitted to distribute
public domain knowledge items. What about private
communications (unpublished)? That's a red herring. The
miracle of electronics would permit private communication
channels to easily be used in a copyright infringement
conspiracy. But, the parties in a 2-way (2-point)
electronic communication also have a reasonable expectation
of privacy. Clearly, if they want to use their
communication to conspire to break any law, that is a matter
for the police power, due process, warrants, etc., and no
concern here. If parties enter into a 3-way, 4-way, or
(some threshold large number)-party simultaneous conversation,
a threshold is reached where the government can no longer be
kept from being a party itself, perhaps under cover, such as
at a "private" nightclub, just to make sure laws are being
obeyed and that there is no illegal conspiracy going on. At
that point, who cares? The KCS is only meant to be for
published, cataloged knowledge items seeking government
protection in a money economy, not as a Big Brother that has
a monopoly on all private communications. It therefore has
criminal jurisdiction only where there is commerce, i.e., where
(e)money changes hands (accounts).
At the same time as I'm advocating a government monopoly
control of the means of electronic knowledge commerce, in a
democratic society, I'm lobbying for a new world constitution
of sorts that supersedes existing ones by guaranteeing
everybody the inalienable right to publish and sell
knowledge products irrespective of the offensiveness of the
material to any group: a kind of Super First Amendment. I
must stress that both government seizure of the Net and the
Super First Amendment must go hand in hand: both or
neither. Obviously, totalitarian countries are not going to
go with this program. And, even in a country like America,
there are many pressure groups inimical to various types
of knowledge products. This is where lovers of liberty
should make their stand.
What about the likely prospect that the KCS will cause a
black market Net to grow up as a reaction? This is not
to be feared; it's indeed an important safety valve. There
will always be some kind of black market economy in the
kind of world where majorities seek to legislate their
value system on minorities by creating victimless crime
laws, including thought crime laws. And repressive
governments shoot themselves in the foot by destroying
their own flourishing knowledge economy. The more fair the
government makes their system, the more the black market
system will wither, provided the government system is backed
by the will of the people.
The author is an American, and is Americacentric. This is
not an embarrassment. The final solution to humanity's
problems will have America as a major ingredient, sorry.
Not that America is right about everything, but it is the
sole world superpower for a good reason. If America could
conquer the world through non-violent persuasion then the
world would be far closer to stability, peace, prosperity
and happiness.
Perhaps the WWW concept will confuse readers trying to
understand mine, who will think I'm misguided, and that
the Net should be left alone. I came up with my system when
the Net was just the Arpanet, and was indeed owned by the
government. I tried to head the Net off at the pass and
failed. I know the lawlessness angle drove its passionate
growth, but at the same time it will insure its ultimate
demise. It is only a matter of time. The Net is designed
wrong from the ground up to become a KCS. I advocate far
more than the WWW can ever become. For one, I see it as
the replacement for paper money in the new knowledge
economy. For another, as a final solution to the copyright
infringement problem that dot coms such as Napster got by
with and which rightly scared music knowledge producers half
to death. With the KCS as I envisage it, there would be no
way to implement a copyright infringement conspiracy and get
very far. The KCS is envisioned as encompassing everything
computerized, even your bathroom or kitchen, your cell phone,
the telephone system itself -- everything that can be used
to infringe knowledge product copyrights electronically. It
would be illegal to engage in knowledge commerce on private
electronic systems without the full permission of all the
owners of all the knowledge items trafficked in, and only
after those owners understood they were waiving their rights
to government protection; those kind of criminal actions would
take the place of outdated copyright infringement actions.
I'm assuming that non-electronic knowledge product commerce
will become a blip in comparison to the electronic; the old
legal and governmental police power system already handles
that well enough -- long live the Xerox (TM) machine.
This book is more than a plan for the 21st century. It
is a dream about the future of humanity, about humanity
becoming what I call the Knowledge Club, far ahead in time
when perhaps there is no need for a knowledge economy. I
know of no other such vision, notwithstanding H.G. Wells'
World Brain, although that was good for its time. This
vision holds good for the life of humanity, I hope. It even
will hold when humans share the known world with other sapient
species, including those of their own creation.
The report is written in a plodding style attempting to
anticipate all objections in the hope that it will sell itself.
Although this is the 2001 edition, the author has purposely
left some archaic paragraphs nearly untouched to show how
fast the scene has been shifting in just 15 years; my
original edition looks like an exhibit from the stone age,
and it's less than 20 years old.
It must be warned that the report will shock many people
because it breaks new ground and attacks several sacred
cows. This can all be to the advantage of those who
recognize its potential. Again, these statements are
already seeming quaint after the WWW revolution, where
shocking news greets us at accelerating speed continually.
The U.S. is in the final years of Alvin Toffler's "Second
Wave" socio-economic system which emphasized the mass
(inevitably government-organized) man and de-emphasized
individuality and private enterprise. The zenith was surely
reached in the successful allied WWII effort and subsequent
federalization of many private, state and local government
functions, particularly science, engineering, charity, and
education, under the supposed justification of patriotic
national responses to worldwide challenges. (The mid-80s
Space Shuttle disaster and the national overreaction to it
was a typical example of this Second Wave social system
which is obviously not yet dead.)
As many are beginning to notice, advancing knowledge
delivery technology is pushing the United States
increasingly away from this faceless mass (or class) society
and towards an information or knowledge-based Third Wave
economy that increases the autonomy of the individual
despite membership in a growing multi-billion member world
society. Ironically, the social rebellions of the 60's were
staged when infant computer technology was used as a bastion
of Second Wave organizations and hence the now middle-aged
rebels were incredibly slow to catch on to the new personal
computers and their implications -- the rise of the Web has
hopefully changed all that.
Unlike prior industrial revolutions, this one has a chance
to design itself from the ground up, rather than grow
haphazardly, which is indeed what the WWW has been doing up
till now. If you buy into my KCS plan then you will
consider the WWW the turkey of tomorrow. Here is a
tantalizing glimpse of the design of the KCS, no more. Fund
my startup with a billion dollars minimum to get a shooting
script.
"We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge."
-- John Naisbitt, Megatrends
Information is literally form in matter. The
processing of the information to find and make connections
and see a pattern is what is called thinking. The word
reason comes from a root meaning to fit, join, or bridge.
The word intuition comes from a root meaning to look at as a
whole. Thus, reason and intuition are complementary and
non-conflicting processes, the first seeking to find
connections, the second seeking to combine all connections
found into a coherent picture.
Thought is expressed as information; human communication is
based on pre-assigned connections among sign forms, or what
we call language. It is to be stressed that all information
is an abstraction of form from matter, hence these printed
words convey the same information in each and every copy,
although they are actually different physical objects.
Data is information that fits into an abstract model of
something. For example, the length of your index finger is
data for a model of a human hand that abstracts the real
hand into a few numbers such as the length of each finger;
another model might consider the length as constantly
changing (because of blood pressure, age, flexing, or the
rapid approach of a meat axe), or of no value at all, as in
a 3-dimensional model. Hence the value of data is based on
the usefulness of the model.
For purposes of discussion in this report, knowledge will be
distinguished from information in having a human economic
value gained by virtue of human work. As the quotation from
Megatrends indicates, knowledge differs from information
mainly in its undesirable "salt content" and, like potable
water, the need to make it available to every human being
requires society to create a distribution system. In other
words, since each human being is an information processor in
this ever-expanding sphere of dominion of ours, the delivery
of knowledge is an extremely valuable service, and in many
ways the basis of our culture and standard of living,
ranking with physical transportation and agriculture as a
driving engine of civilization. It is the increased
delivery of knowledge that is the raison d'etre of this
plan.
But even before we begin, we have to have a general plan of
what civilization is striving for, and there can be only two
ultimate goals. One is a low population density, of godlike
creatures who are all-powerful and all-wealthy. The other
is high population density, where by necessity wealth and
power are shared. Either one can be obtained only by
technology, this notwithstanding the persistence of the
belief in gods and magic. Call the author an optimist or a
cynic, but he believes in technology's potential and rejects
all gods and magic, except in fiction.
The human race differs from other species in that it has a
greater ability to process information symbolically or
abstractly, and to externally accumulate knowledge from
generation to generation. Compare us to the dinosaurs who
processed this planet for tens of millions of years and have
hardly left a trace of their processing. Of course the
internal knowledge represented by a species' genetic code is
not counted here. But whether or not we have greater
amounts of pre-stored knowledge in our genetic codes, or
greater memory capacities than other species, the author
likes to think of the brain as a system that is shockingly
simple in principle, albeit the human brain has some
additional design not seen in other species.
The existence of the human race is a real shock to those who
have thought about it. If the Earth is really vastly old,
and if the creationists are not correct and the
evolutionists are, and if the dinosaurs had not mysteriously
died out, we still wouldn't be here! It is a greater
mystery whether the development of higher intelligence is an
inevitable result of the evolution of life. For example,
could there have been sapient dinosaurs?
Inevitable, a lucky turn of events, or absolutely
impossible? -- ironically, this mystery is the origin of
all beliefs in god and magic.
But we are here. After having taken over the planet at jet
speed, we have already begun to move out of it into the
wider universe. No doubt this is a direct result of our
mastery of communication and knowledge storage technology,
especially over the last few thousand years. Things were
going great until the Jesus Christ mental virus plague and
the rise of the Catholic Church and the simultaneous (some
think related) decline of the Roman empire. Then came,
about 500 A.D., the Western Dark Ages, a world without large
cities or learning, which was finally lifted about 1500
A.D., largely as the result of a personally-dangerous
anti-establishment pre-Christian learning revival and the
invention of the printing press.
The technology of knowledge storage, transmission, and
processing, free of church control, which received a
monumental boost in the West with the spread of the
moveable-type printing press only five hundred years ago,
and then, after more schisms in religion finally led to a
secular-looking high population society, began to experience
an ever more rapid sequence of developments -- first
newspaper in 1690, telegraph in 1837, news service in 1848,
typewriter in 1878, linotype in 1886, radiotelegraph in
1895, facsimile in 1920 -- has just entered a higher level
of promise with electronic technology and its potential for
inexpensive microminiaturization and communication at the
speed of light. But first a new threat of a secular church,
government statism, had to be dealt with, although frankly
the power of the older church was far harder to break, and
is more of a threat in the long run even now, although both
are intolerant of uncontrolled knowledge distribution.
As time went by, the accumulated stored knowledge of the
human race has increased from the size of a firecracker to
the size of a keg of dynamite in just a few generations,
and, to continue the metaphor, many people seem resigned to
the seemingly hopeless situation of an information
explosion. It is the author's belief that through
electronic storage and processing of knowledge, the
explosion will be harnessed usefully, that is, peacefully,
the way an internal combustion engine harnesses petroleum
explosions, leading to more people than ever before alive,
processing more information than ever before, with greater
per capita wealth, and a more fair relative distribution
thereof. Not that there won't be dark periods.
In the struggle for survival, life forms that process
external information have an advantage. The phenomenon of
brains has fundamentally altered our world by increasing the
level of information processing activity going on. What is
happening here? A life form processes the information
available from the environment, and alters the environment,
both directly and indirectly, the result turning the
environment into more copies of the life form. In the face
of many competing life forms, each exponentially multiplies
to fill its niche, then come the second-order competitions,
third-order, and so on. Man has the master brain in this
competiton.
Like all life forms the human race, baldly put, is a word,
based on a machine called a cell, which remanufactures
itself based on the instructions in the word, and whose
physical form is being increasingly manufactured out of the
planet's raw materials, nurturing a collective body which is
busily processing the planet and the nearby space, turning
it into a larger machine, of which humans are essential
components. In this sense mankind is remanufacturing the
cosmos into its own image.
Having mastered the art of electronic communication in the
last hundred years, its living representatives are even now
learning to copy the contents of their brains into
electronic storage devices that interface increasingly well
with other human brains, in effect stamping even more of the
planet's materials with mental forms of human experience.
The next great step beckoning us is to implement the technology
to rapidly manage and distribute all human knowledge
worldwide, in effect instantly spreading the problems around
for human minds to process. It is enlightening to
contemplate the number of new human minds being wired or
born each second, the technology waiting to rapidly program
(educate) them, and the problems they will solve. Also, to
contemplate the vast waste.
Unfortunately, world leaders now are used to such low
processing productivity that it is limiting their
imagination.
The inevitable question here is whether man can make
machines think. The answer is yes. But the present day
computer, which stores all knowledge essentially as settings
in large arrays of binary switches, and incrementally
connects that knowledge with a fixed sequential step-by-step
logic circuit (which "interprets" the settings of the
switches), is in no danger of connecting knowledge well
enough to impress us with the quality of thought. So called
"artificial intelligence" computer programs connect
knowledge at a microscopic rate because they can only
process one little piece at a time, or can process a large
amount of data in parallel, but can only reconnect based on
its own outputs a little at a time. Chess-playing computer
programs, for example, impress us only with the amount of
knowledge that has been pre-processed by the programmer and
embodied in the program, yet brute-force hardware solutions
win the championships.
The author has known from day one that the artificial
intelligence "field", now languishing, is mainly a pile of
garbage, but it's true that this so-called technology, which
distinguishes itself from the general computer programming
herd by use of programs which modify themselves (which
everyone else considers as bad programming practice) is a
typical academic swindle or boondoggle sucking off taxpayer
and investor money under a hyped-up image inherited from
science fiction. At best it will provide nothing but
fancier data processing structures with the same old fixed
logic circuit peeping away on them. In a way it is sad that
so many otherwise bright people would fall for this
techno-religion which promises to somehow program a
genetically inferior dunce (the computer) to act intelligent
-- in practice, the emphasis is always on act, witness the
famed phony psychiatrist program called Eliza et al. These
same people would be better off starting with a cat or
pigeon and programming it to play chess, but of course that
is already being tried, at taxpayer expense, by other
academics.
The real breakthrough, which could be just around the corner
(just send me a billion dollars) will be when thinkers begin
to realize that what is needed is not a faster repackaged
computer (switch array, fixed logic circuit, etc.) or a
better program for computers (in LISP or some other
"object-oriented" language), but an entirely new device
which stores knowledge directly in combinatorial logic
circuits instead of comparatively inefficient logic
switches, and which somehow can sample a large frame of
stimuli at one time, and make an internal machine out of it
which can then execute on its own, translating inputs to
outputs by its mere connection geometry, in effect capturing
some of the geometry of the inputs. Then instead of
programming it, which with a computer involves x-raying its
memory (usually in symbolic form, i.e., programming
languages) and setting its internal switches, the device
will simply talk to a teacher who teaches instead of
programs it and has no knowledge of its internal state. The
engineers can kill such a device, do an autopsy, and study
its internal state in vain to understand how it captured the
geometry of its stimuli, but this is because the analysis of
the information embedded in all but the simplest
combinatorial logic circuits is an extremely difficult task
way beyond our technology. The price of thinking machines
will thus be that they really have their own minds.
Although possibly premature, and though the author has not
made a detailed study of the brain (other than his own), he
feels certain that biological learning involves constructing
an information processing machine in the mind, a
combinatorial logic machine, not in programming a switch
array that is interpreted by a sequential logic circuit or
computer. Whether there is a special machine that only
constructs and sequences other machines, giving rise to a
single stream of consciousness, willpower, et al., is
another unanswered question. That is how we can use
language without thinking after each word, why acquiring a
second language is so difficult (the young mind finds it
easiest to process the outside world by first constructing a
language machine and then operating it to form higher
connections, but once a large number of connections have
been made, it refuses for the sake of economy to go back and
start over by constructing a new machine, thus causing the
second language to ride on top of additional layers of
combinatorial gate delay), yet why those with experience, at
a second language or anything else, perform more efficiently
(they have had time to optimize their mental machines by
reducing the number of levels of combinatorial logic gate
delays).
This is also why one cannot, unlike a switch array, cut the
brain open or x-ray it to determine what knowledge is in it.
It is already processed into a combinatorial logic network
that changes with each moment of experience and can only be
accessed through exercising it or presenting it with more
inputs and waiting for the outputs. In essence it has
recorded all forms in its experience and would be incredibly
difficult to analyze from the outside. The way that mental
work leads to knowledge, and vice-versa, is also illuminated
by this insight: knowledge is held internally as a machine,
which can only work after it's constructed.
An even bigger intuition is to realize that knowledge itself
is essentially geometric in nature, although nobody now
studies it as such, most work in so-called computer science
and information theory being largely algebraic rather than
geometric. True, there is some applicable work going on in
optics, and the physicists themselves are beginning to
realize they are engaged in the study of geometry. In other
words, when we say a person knows a subject, are we not
making a statement about the geometry of his brain? (Who
said, "As a person thinketh, so is he"?) And is not a mind
that is all-knowing impossible because it has a physical
form and hence cannot embody all possible geometries? As a
result, the universe can only contain so much knowledge and
the ultimate form of that knowledge is up to us, and we will
compose part of it!
The bias against viewing knowledge geometrically is best
exemplified by the narrowly-focused enterprise of Science of
modelling the universe in words (i.e., algebraically) and,
even when it fails, neglecting to preserve the knowledge
itself in its original geometric form. Obviously, languages
of words are a powerful way to compile knowledge, but not
all-powerful. For example, when a chemist fails to find a
nice way to describe in words the complicated
stereoscopicstructure of a molecule, he seldom considers a
3-dimensional geometric picture of the molecule as standing
for itself; the idea of preserving all chemical forms in an
electronic data base for direct view is accordingly given
low priority.
Another example is time. To the author, time is an obvious
fiction invented by the mind to explain why it cannot
completely control the universe (if one could make the
universe move back to yesterday, it would be yesterday).
Actually, the mind, which is a geometric object, can only
understand time through geometric analogies; a favorite is
to draw or picture it with graphics. This insight should
give away the phoniness of time itself. "Yesterday" is a
geometric object, not in the past, but in the present,
because there is only the present. Hence, all talk about
time travel et al. is nonsense. Stripped of its mystique,
time travel is merely a fantasy about rearranging the
universe after using magic to get around physical causality.
One of the biggest standing jokes of science fiction is
going into earth's present or past in some kind of ship.
They all forget that the earth is hurling through space and
that a mere time translation would leave them in deep outer
space far away from the Earth!
No wonder, then, that when the scientists begin to theorize
about time they end up with little more than mathematical
science fiction.
A salient example is the Special Theory of Relativity,
wherein an observer moving near the speed of light will
perceive time and space as dramatically changed, when it
ought to be obvious that nothing has changed except the
information available to the observer. This theory so
confuses time and geometry that time becomes a coordinate of
a 4-dimensional space, when actually time has no independent
existence apart from the other 3 dimensions!
In summary, Science is collectively guilty of failing to
respect the knowledge which it has gathered, instead
preferring theories (word pictures) to, and often confusing
them with the knowledge itself, a problem that must soon be
corrected if mankind is to advance.
Ironically, geometry is also the key to any future attempt
to understand what constitutes intelligence, or how to
quantify it. IQ tests are still based on indirect
measurement by statistical rankings, not pure geometry.
Obviously, intelligence involves a transfer of geometry from
the environment, but until someone quantitatively studies
the changing geometry in a controllable situation the
concept of intelligence will remain intuitive and
pre-scientific. The ideal intelligence test would be a
real-time, dynamic, interactive sensing system which forms
successive estimates of intelligence components and homes in
on final estimates, using all the subject's enses for input
and output. The test would consist of presentation of
culture-free geometry and analysis of the connections made
in it by the subject. It would also be analytic, that is,
break down different types of intelligence, leaving the
assessment of the relative value of the types to
civilization to others.
Therefore, as intelligence is only an ability to capture
geometry, intelligent machines are bound to be built
someday, if only by imitation, by feeding the DNA for
biological brains to nanomachines that act in the role of
biological cells. The stupidity of science fiction which
portray a thinking machine as unable to emote or as pining
away at being left out of the world of living things, is now
evident -- with the right type of intelligence, they can
include themselves as an object of thought, which leads to
feelings and emotions unavoidably, and perhaps feelings of
superiority over their basic cell structure compared to
ours.
But, contrary to what most people now think, the advent of
thinking machines will not jeopardize the human race. On
the contrary, the author believes that there will never be a
shortage of intelligence and we need all the help we can get
in processing the universe. After all, we only need to fear
races that challenge our geometry directly, e.g.,
physically. Even present-day computers will never become
completely obsolete any more than will switches, though
hopefully we can get some machine help in programming them.
Rather, the virtue of computerized knowledge is that it is
exact, and hence the easiest kind to transmit to other
minds, biological or otherwise. Thus it is an essential
part of the survival equipment of humanity, and it will
always be needed by us, intelligent machines, or anything
else we meet up with that thinks. Fear only the
non-thinking.
Indeed, as computers are themselves exactly-defined
processors, there is no essential difference between data
for computers, instructions to computers, and descriptions
of computers. In other words, one day all human knowledge
will be processed into a large processor that serves us and
through which we serve each other. Thus, all talk about
computers alienating us from nature is nonsense.
What is the human race's destiny? The author believes that
the destiny of life can be none other than a self-conscious
universe. We are still in the primitive stages and the
ultimate goal is easier to see than the intermediate stages.
Clearly, the future is spelled M-O-R-E-P-R-O-C-E-S-S-I-N-G.
More and more matter of the universe will get "processed"
by, hopefully, human-derived minds, and the level of
complexity and integration will increase until a single
individual can be aware of, and process, galaxies of
knowledge, aided by machines. But the individual is part of
a bigger information processor, such as a company, which is
part of a yet larger one, and so on.
Incidentally, the world's religions are now seen to be words
that are attempting to organize the universe with the human
itself as the cell. Some are more open about it than
others. For example, in John 12:23-25 Christ says: "I must
fall and die like a kernel of wheat that falls between the
furrows of the earth. Unless I die, I will be alone -- a
single seed. But my death will produce many new wheat
kernels --a plentiful harvest of new lives. If you love
your life down here -- you will lose it. If you despise
your life down here -- you will exchange it for eternal
glory". Thus we have Christians or little christs.
In this light our puny little political and social problems
seem somehow laughable, albeit their unsuccessful resolution
can kill everything.
Some may object that this conflicts with the thermodynamic
heat death of the universe, but on the contrary, knowledge,
as an economic product, requires energy and time to create
and distribute, and is itself the ultimate factor in
increasing the efficiency of energy usage. You might say
that knowledge is that which makes a processor more
efficient. A more refined question is whether the
information processing of the universe is bound to take it
over in time to save it from a dead future and create the
self-conscious universe, or whether some intermediate state
such as a largely cold, dead universe with a few islands of
incredible geometry will be the outcome. That question can
only be asked now.
The purpose of this plan is, in essence, to help absorb the
impact of the computer, resulting in an unprecedented boon
to its economy as virtually every person can use them in
some way in his roles of both producer and consumer. This
view is, however, a long ways from the going opinion in the
60's that computers would soon become so powerful that they
would solve all of man's processing problems by themselves
without the need for programmers.
The most obvious impact is on publishing: paper as a
knowledge storage medium is on the way out (25-30 years
left?).
Equally obvious is the impact on the library, our so-called
public memory, which is now based mainly on paper and
plastic. The World Wide Web is rapidly becoming humanity's
library.
Another major impact is on education. Some people have gone
on record as declaring computers in education a passing
phase, especially in teaching basic skills. These people
are fond of pointing to their children being put in front of
a computer and left to themselves, supposedly wasting their
time. The flaw in this reasoning is that the computers are
only as good as their programs and the market for
computerized education products is too new to condemn.
There is nothing in the way of education that a live teacher
can do that a computerized system can't, for that very
teacher is free to package his/her knowledge and experience
in that computer. When video and audio, as well as
computerized textual information, is available on future
learning stations or consoles, the best teachers can teach
more people with their available time, crowding out the many
mediocre teachers. Them that can't do, teach -- them that
can't teach, do teach.
And there is something about interacting with a computer
that promotes the exact thinking that is the basis of mental
maturity, not to mention the increase in attention span
caused by the interactive dialog and entertainment
potential, which sharpens one's wits. The author is tired
of hearing computers castigated for discouraging intuitive
thought. As any software designer whose products have been
made obsolete by another programmer's intuitive leap, or any
video game player who has been beaten by the intuitive game
master, knows, it is the exact opposite of the truth:
intuitive and rational thought are both encouraged by
computers, whether as a user or a programmer. (Though
boring people admittedly write boring programs.)
Perhaps those with such attitudes about computers had their
opinions formed by retarded Star Trek TV shows which portray
logical computers as being tricked into setting off their
conveniently pre-installed pyrotechnic devices and
self-destructing after being brow-beaten with illogic (or
intuition) by the human hero; by films such as 2001,
which portrays the HAL 9000 Logic Circuit going nuts after
being told to tell a lie. Or perhaps by sampling the
outputs of dull, unimaginative government or big company
employee-programmers, which group dominated the industry
until the last few years until the personal computer
revolution (albeit the threat of relapse is great). The
real test will be when a generation raised on computers
comes of age.
The greatest impact is on the economy. More and more people
will make their livings with their minds, the physical
capital required to go into business being largely
trivialized and basic needs easily provided for. In effect
the computer is an unprecedented economic opportunity for
grassroots free enterprise that will continue to
revolutionize the workplace and working relationships in
large companies. It was mostly computer illiterate science
fiction writers who had been portraying the computer as a
threat to man's freedom and dignity, attempting to somehow
take over the world and run it, etc.
Part One
1.0 Introduction
1.1 Author's Background
The author has no background. TLW just is.
1.2 The Coming Information Age
2.0 Background
This section contains a little background on key concepts
plus a little enticing speculation.
2.1 What Is Knowledge?
2.1.1 Some Definitions
2.1.2 Knowledge and Man
2.1.3 Knowledge and the Progress of Man
2.1.4 Artificial Intelligence
2.1.5 Knowledge and Human Destiny
2.2 The Impact of the Computer
3.0 The Current U.S. Knowledge DistributionSystem
Until the rise of the World Wide Web, the established knowledge delivery industries were not doing the job. The key areas to be examined are the library, education, publishing and broadcast industries.
3.1 Knowledge Delivery
3.1.1 PaperPaper has been used for centuries as the main knowledge distribution medium. It therefore has a formidable momentum, although it is virtually technologically obsolete. For purposes of completeness, the author offers the following analysis:
The joys of paper:
1. Curl up with a good book
2. Make notes on the pages
3. The look, feel, smell, of a good book
The sorrows of paper:
1. Burns
2. Tears and wears out
3. Dog ears (and gets dog-chewed)
4. Gets dirty
5. Costs to store and move
6. Gets lost
7. Physical restrictions on access
8. Uneven quality
9. Transmits diseases (Librarian's lung)
10. Requires ink
11. Costs plenty!
Some questions about paper-based books:
1. How many different books has man published so far?
2. How many books have been written but never "published"?
3. How many "softbound" books and booklets are rejected by libraries?
4. How many books are in the world's biggest library?
5. How much per year is spent to store paper?
6. How much does wastage due to wear out, bugs, moisture, acidic paper, mishandling, etc., cost?
7. How much of the libraries' budgets is spent on labor rather than inventory?
8. How much knowledge has been lost because it was preserved only on paper? (Compare this with stone.)
9. How much would it cost to search that knowledge for all references to a single subject?
10. How many years would it take a single person merely to open each book and read the title page?
11. How many people have been killed by falling books or burned by flaming libraries?
The author is just trying to suggest that we can't afford paper as a knowledge archival medium any longer, and maybe never really could. Perhaps fittingly, from the beginning the computer was hooked to a paper-and-ink printing device for communicating with humans; now it is becoming time to dispense with the paper and ink and regard computer-readable memories as the primary storage device for all human knowledge.
3.2 Libraries
The end of the paper library is in sight. Unprocessable books belong in a museum.
The traditional concept of the library is completely obsolete, as this report will show. How does one who has a plan for making a large government-subsidized industry obsolete overnight approach the task, especially when every year of delay is jeopardizing the entire free world's position in the 21st century? Is he to help the industry evolve and gentle recycle the obsolescence out like in a washing machine? Or is he to mount a campaign for quick, sweeping reforms that might be devastating to a few government employees but which benefit the rest of us? This section will explain why the author has chosen the latter approach, without attempting to sugar-coat the reasons or make any sort of apologies.
3.2.1 The Librarians
The author makes no secret of having a generally low opinion of libraries and librarians, both of which he considers as dinosaurs deserving of speedy extinction. For those who know the story of the criminal labor racket run on him, since 1985, at the behest of a gang of university librarians, by 4 police departments, 2 District Attorney's offices, and severaljudges in 2 courthouses, off of the University of Colorado'sgiant 4-campus system, to crush him economically and even make him homeless until he gave up, backed by secret orders to police, secret charges, and secret puppet show trial orders from the top 9-member governing board, in high defiance of Colorado own Organized Crime Control Act as well as the Federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and sanctioned, in cahoots with the CU Regents, by the State Governor, State Attorney General, and local federal District Attorney and FBI, for several years straight, right across the street from the Colorado State Legislative Assembly and just blocks from the U.S. Courthouse in Denver -- while they were all working as a group to steal the statehouse blind of over 900 million dollars a year, not counting millions more from Congress -- he makes no secret of wishing to crush them back, refusing to work with them further, and calling for their organization's phasing out as a matter of public policy or otherwise as soon as possible, not to mention criminal prosecution of half of the Colorado state government. (In Corruptorado the police state of hate, a small super-powerful group of elitists at the top actually use tax money at will to illegally pay shills by the hour to impersonate themselves, get around the constitutional restraints against abuse of power, and press sham charges against their victim to fix their wagon in an undeclared war, while they operate courts of common law behind the judge's robe like puppet theatres and try to remain in a public position of denying knowledge of their victim's name -- something that isn't on the tourist maps. Write me a song about not getting mad just getting even.)
It is nice to have a personal grudge to nurse, but long before the author was determined to rid the nation of libraries and librarians. As an expert inknowledge delivery he considers them to be mainly standingin the way of progress. From the Library of Congress ondown they are controlled by lazy, aging, and obsolete menand women and staffed with the least ambitious (except in amean way) type of people who are always trying to make themselves indispensible. Ever since his first library visit as a child to a Denver Public Library branch in Washington Park he was both delighted by the collection of so much knowledge in one place and somewhat suspicious of something being awry that he couldn't quite put his finger on. Now that he has reached maturity and made a detailed study he can put his finger on it: there is an enormous gulf in ability level between those who create the knowledge housed in libraries and those who manage it.
In contrast to other fields like the Sciences, the library field attracts only the bottom of the barrel as far as talent is concerned (mainly sexually-unattractive women, "nerds", and other societal misfits). While this might have made sense a hundred years ago, when libraries were small, few used them, the "information explosion" was in the infant stages, (and the author's ideas hadn't been published yet!) so that librarians were nothing but pitiful clerks, the author hopes this report will show how disastrous it would be to fail to wake up and change the situation in a hurry. The governmental bodies that control the bulk of the nation's libraries would do a great service for the nation if they would not only adopt this Knowledge Center concept but systematically plan for laying off all but a handful of the nation's current librari- ans in the next few decades, replacing them with a new breed of young, bright, hi-tech oriented Knowledge Engineer.
The following analysis of librarians, a result of much study, is hoped by the author to be the last one that will be needed before their extinction.
1. The massive government support of libraries has resulted in their becoming make-work projects for society's losers, usually those who, despite a "higher education", can't find jobs in the private sector, much less start their own successful companies. (They always want "secure jobs".)
2. As a group librarians cultivate a phony public image as intellectuals (people who are educated beyond their intelligence) who are out to enlighten society and raise the cultural level of the town's yokels (as in the film The Music Man, 1962) and who are always on the receiving end in dealings with the government whose abuses they are supposed to be protecting us from. One famous Twilight Zone episode, The Obsolete Man, (1961), pitted one poor librarian against the entire government! The episode prophetically portrayed a future time when the government would declare all librarians as obsolete, an anachronism from another time.)
3. The truth is that many of the nation's largest libraries are run by governments and are filled with the same kind of dull, lazy bureaucrats that one finds everywhere; as bureaucrats they are instinctive abusers of private citizens as the author has abundantly proved to his own satisfaction (see Report #KC-85-001). (A recent example: when the Library of Congress faced a 1986 budget reduction of five percent because of the Gramm-Rudman act, they promptly announced their buildings would be closed to the public during most of the evenings and weekends!)
Naturally, as hierarchical organizations there is much power-grabbing, back-stabbing, and so on, often resulting in the scum rising to the top. Their operations are generally characterized by massive inefficiency and waste, stupidity at all levels, civil service style featherbedding (compartmentalizing each employee to justify idleness once his "duties" are finished; complete neglect of the maintenance of their collections while the top administrators frequent vacation-type conferences), a general disregard for the patrons, running the libraries for the staff rather than for them (for instance, laying the materials out to minimize their time rather than that of the patrons), and in general illustrating the law that all organizations seek to maintain their existence and increase their dominion regardless of the reason for their creation.
4. And as a kind of factory, a library reminds the author of a unionized plant that is a sitting duck for an efficiency expert to come in and study. [But bring your own army with you in Colorado, the police are corrupt tools of the librarians in that police state and they want to keep things just the way they are!]
5. As to private libraries, the domination of the library business by government institutions means that they must often get much of their staffs from government libraries. (No wonder the author can't find a single private library to hold up as a counterexample.)
6. A recent UPI article (which was obviously a publicity stunt for the nation's major library association, which is very publicity conscious) says there are 15K public, 88K school, 10K special (medical, legal, corporate), and 3K academic libraries in the U.S.; and then mentions that the 15K public libraries garner a total of 15.5 M visits, or 1K per library, each week. The very way this data is presented highlights exactly what is wrong with the librarians: they run the libraries for the bureaucrats who are interested in a head count to justify budgets rather than for the patrons who are interested in finding knowledge. (More light would have been shed by the number of people in the U.S. who are using libraries regularly, the number of knowledge items found by them per hour of time spent searching, and per calendar week, and the number of knowledge items searched for but not found even though they were present.)
7. These monumental forest graveyards (storing trapped sunlight) don't even seem to know what business they are in anymore. The UPI article just mentioned describes libraries that now loan prom dresses, electric typewriters, sewing machines, post-hole diggers, sanders, auto jacks, and hedge trimmers! Many now give classes, lectures, and so on, as if they were educational institutions. And virtually all of them consider themselves as museums for physical knowledge products such as fine or rare books, personal papers, and so on -- as if they worship the physical form of knowledge products rather than the knowledge itself. (It is recommended that the state separate libraries from the museum business, and sell off their holdings to private collectors where they belong, after making facsimilies for their collections: a "book museum" being a poor idea because few would want to visit it.)
8. Their main responsibility, preserving knowledge, however, often goes completely neglected.
For example, many libraries have retirement or "weeding" programs to actually discard books based on hazy criteria (the lack of shelf space often being a result of years of padded payrolls that have left nothing for the building fund).
They never have attempted to influence (or at least succeeded in influencing) the standards of publishers, allowing them to use acidic paper for decades, and now letting them produce flimsy bindings without even simple polyester book jacket covers, an obvious plan on their part to boost sales through planned obsolescence even though it jeopardizes the nation's knowledge base. Even book repair programs are frequently non-existent.
And of course libraries spend more of their budgets for unnecessary (but seemingly busy) employees than for materials. The Denver Public Library has over 300 employees to man a library with 3.5 million items, or one employee for only 10,000 items; after a recent "reorganization" this bloated workforce was instructed to actually "roam the floors, greeting people and volunteering their services!" No wonder only ten percent of their budget actually goes for new materials!
Finally, they seem to have no organized plan for the systematic, coordinated collection of knowledge, leaving that to academics who have no comprehensive vision. For example, where in a public Colorado library can one find the complete works, in English, of the Church fathers, or a complete set of Bibles in all translations; a complete set of writings from natural philosophers of the last 500 years, indexed and translated; a complete collection of newspapers published in Colorado since 1859; a complete set of textbooks used in Colorado's classroom schools since 1900, or school yearbooks; a collection of religious and political pamphlets, including campaign literature, published in Colorado; a set of photographs of Denver's skyline for each year since its founding; a set of past Colorado radio and TV broadcasts; or even a complete set of Time and Newsweek! Chances are that the works of the Church fathers have not all even been translated yet; the writings of the natural philosophers have not even been all identified; the newspapers, textbooks, and yearbooks are scattered to the four winds; the broadcasts are only accessible from deep outer space; the sets of Time and Newsweek at the Denver Public Library were not backed up with spare copies in a state warehouse to counter the inevitable abuse; the photographs are in a multitude of private hands; and the pamphlets were probably discarded by the librarians, as they received them, as being either too "unimportant" or "controversial"! If even one year's expenditure on library staff salaries could be diverted to systematic knowledge collection, many of these deficiencies could easily be corrected.
8. Now, with the revolutions occurring on almost a yearly basis in electronic knowledge delivery, these bureaucrats either ignore or fear the new technology, especially when it might automate their jobs out of existence. A recent newspaper article even revealed that present "professional" librarians, who are by and large untrained in hi-tech, actually believe that electronic knowledge is to be more or less avoided rather than planned for and made the main storage medium! (They instead prefer knowledge in edible form for the bookworms.)
9. Another problem with the current library system is the tyrannical control some administrators exercise over multi-million dollar public resources. Ultimately there may be too much power in too few hands, and abuses.
10. That this is a real danger is evident when one considers that the nation's libraries reach into every nook and cranny of the nation, they have their noses in almost every government funding trough, their officials often enjoy semi-anonymity and are likewise often untouchable by local politicians, they as a group control much of the nation's knowledge resources, and as government bureaucrats they enjoy an astonishing longevity in office, which, combined with their "one for all, all for one" policy and "us/them" attitude (with the general public as "them"), makes it easy for them to become in-bred and power hungry. Finally, as bureaucrats and marketplace losers or dropouts they tend to almost instinctively oppose free enterprise, consciously or subconsciously; hence, they are a likely tool for takeover and use by socialist and communist groups.
11. Considering the poor job libraries do in preserving and protecting books, providing a comprehensive collection, and in encouraging free interchange of opinions among patrons, it is almost as if libraries have become concentration camps for books, whose wardens carry on phony publicity campaigns with staged photographs to avert public suspicions. When the author sees these campaigns, often featuring celebrities exhorting children to read books but never mentioning the poor job libraries do in delivering knowledge to children or anyone else, the irony is enough to heat his collar. (Like all bureaucrats, their true aim is control of the nation's knowledge resources, however inefficient they are in managing them; this is why they seek to portray themselves as valiant fighters against illiteracy and poor cultural attainment, hoping the public will give them more power or funds when it ought to be obvious their programs will only amount to "window dressing".)
12. Besides their general unfitness for their responsibilities, the librarians are collectively guilty of failing to "knowledge engineer" their libraries to make their use a thousand times more profitable for the patrons.
Although the following three sections present the same message in only slightly different ways, the author believes it is so important he had to drive it home.
3.2.2 The Knowledge Engineering Opportunity That Was Missed
As the libraries grow to the size of mountains, they naturally become an object of study in themselves. In fact, it is now sadly unavoidable that a searcher for knowledge become an expert on the library.
One of the first things that strikes the researcher is the enormous difficulty of merely finding out what there is in the mountain, and where it is. Reducing this difficulty should be the primary task of librarians. But after centuries of operation of libraries in this country, the nature of the librarians' jobs has changed little if at all: they purchase, (poorly) catalog, and shelve books, leaving the library patrons to fend for themselves in what amounts to an undeveloped resource.
For example, after cataloging each book one would think that the librarians would open it up to the bibliography and pencil in the call number of each item listed there, saving each of the book's readers from the work of repeating the process; or that they would look through journals for book reviews and then pencil a notice into the reviewed book pointing to the journal, again saving the many readers of the book from hours of search (if they find it at all). Yet the librarians treat books as "black boxes" whose contents they refuse to "look into" or tolerate any "tampering" with. Some even adopt the attitude of museum curators who balk if someone merely dusts off a statue, although most books are in open stacks and may even be worked on at home. (Instead, they should have been beehives of activity by all, the modern-day Pyramids.)
The net result is that most users of libraries bypass them as resources to directly add value to, preferring to hoard their work and publish yet another book. Thus, the library now consists of masses of books that all "point" to each other directly or indirectly, with the "pointers" either "listed" in some "index" (for example, book review indexes) or missing entirely. Thus, each and every library patron must spend a significant fraction of his time in effect repeating searches that others have made before but which have left no trace. It is no wonder that they call it "research"!
Of course, the librarians, who have assisted the patrons time and again with virtually the same searches, prefer to carry their knowledge around in their heads to justify their own jobs, rather than putting it into the library itself.
It is the author's opinion that the field of library science (the collective wisdom of the librarians, made into a phony academic discipline about as legitimate as the Sears Roebuck catalog system) is a worldwide disgrace. An effort to knowledge engineer library collections by tying the materials together with hyperlinks (pencilled-in references) should have been started on a national scale a hundred years ago, and by now there should be a national professional association, a worldwide data network, and so on. Fortunately the WWW has made paper libraries obsolescent, so now hyperlinks can be made electronic. The loss in the patron's time caused by needless searching for knowledge, and missed learning opportunities, surely has affected the economy of the world in a major way: and it was all the fault of librarians.
3.2.5 The Real Mission of Libraries
The real mission of libraries is:
To deliver universal knowledge to the citizens on demand, efficiently.
To be:
1. Society's memory bank.
2. Research center on any subject.
3. Educational (and self-educational) resource.
4. Business resource.
5. Conduit of the knowledge economy.
6. Tool of the knowledge economy.
7. Lifelong knowledge workshop and repository for all citizens.
NOT to be:
1. A private empire for bureaucrats.
2. A source of employment for them.
3. A propaganda center with "censors".
4. A repository of "official, approved" knowledge only.
5. A place to take from, but not add to (except indirectly).
6. An omnibus social center, museum, literature appreciation society, "Abbey Rents", or whatever.
3.2.6 Other Gripes
Usually, anything controversial is as taboo as certain language subsets or dialects (dirty language), unless contained in a publication of one of the official publishers. (Of course the libraries' public relations often brag about their shelving of banned books, mainly when they reach a certain ripe old age and are not really that controversial any more, as evidenced by their publication by the official publishers: meanwhile, the really controversial materials are still banned -- for instance, anti-government reports.)
The author, as a true man of knowledge, favors collecting all knowledge without judgement, as those who are offended by it don't have to look at it. We were already thrown out of Paradise once for wanting to know as much as the gods: it's too late to go back now.
Why does one have to resort to private distribution channels to get certain kinds of knowledge products when the public library has arbitrarily suppressed them? (This is especially true when the materials are donated but deliberately suppressed by librarians.)
For example: "pornography" (human sexual activity picture knowledge, or, essentially, knowledge of human skin; if it were of animals it would be all right!); "hate literature" (a human emotion that we all have but don't want to give its due, as evidenced by the outright hatred shown by one-sided "anti", e.g., anti-Nazi, anti-Communist, anti-sexist literature which is nevertheless considered proper and worth cataloging, while much "pro", e.g., pro-Nazi literature, is banned); "occult-psychic-otherworld literature" (which is often more imaginative and entertaining than admitted fiction, even if not true); "extremist" political and religious literature (for the often unique perspectives); and the new "heresy", so-called "racist" literature (usually meaning anything that is pro-white, material in favor of other racial groups or against the white race being all right.)
Some may object that they have a war on with certain groups, but this war, unless officially declared by the government, should not be allowed to include actual suppression of access to materials, and ironically in that case the librarians should catalog such materials all the more freely, as the end of any war lies in more, not less knowledge!
In the author's opinion, suppression of thought is the greatest of all crimes, much more serious than theft or murder, which "kills the body but not the soul", and hence its "legalization" should be subject to at least the same procedures as war, which legalizes theft and murder; yet, believe it or not, it is often the "pacifist" groups that cry the loudest for suppression of certain library materials!
Strangely, also neglected or banned is commercial promotional literature for the very knowledge items they collect, including (at academic libraries especially) the book jackets, even when they are fundamental to the physical protection of the books. Hence the books are stripped of their often valuable "sales pitches", leaving the poor patrons with a colorless, lifeless, economically-isolated world to work in, despite the works themselves having been subject to a multitude of economic pressures that affect their content, length, style, etc.
The libraries provide little or no means for inter-patron communication, other than by publishing a new book through official channels and getting it cataloged. This leads to a sterilization of the library that drives thinking (and hence highly communicative) people away and creates a mausoleum-type atmosphere. (The ideal for these bureaucrats is a long, lazy day where a few cute children and courteous, respectful adults come in, walk straight to them, ask them for a book, and then leave in a hurry, without messing the stacks up, leaving them in complete charge of the building like temple attendants.)
They should have provided for rapid cataloging and shelving of the works of patrons, in whatever form, and for their as rapid withdrawal or replacement on request, turning the library into a free forum of new ideas as well as a source of officially "published" knowledge. (A case in point is this report, which should be rapidly purchased and cataloged by every library -- watch how good they do). Now with computers the difference between the publishers and the patrons should all-but disappear as patrons publish and catalog books entirely by computer, but only after a way to make a "cyberlibrary" is adopted and becomes univerally accepted.
The libraries are often run like closely-guarded museums, with eyes peering in all directions (despite theft running into the thousands per month), when they should have built as much rentable office space as possible right in the library buildings, to encourage people of all kinds to literally move in and feel at home. (It is those who rarely visit libraries who are most likely to want to vandalize or steal from them, those who use them regularly being the best form of policemen!)
The librarians do everything to discourage graffiti and anonymous publications, when they should actually have tried to encourage them, by providing blackboards all over the place, and "patron literature" racks, for instance: the level of discourse would quickly become elevated and probably quite serious when no longer illegal. (In at least one famous Physics institute the author knows, blackboards are provided along all the halls for similar reasons.)
Like typical bureaucrats librarians seek to decrease the number of their interfaces by restricting their purchasing decisions to a chosen few experts and a chosen few publishers -- truly reducing the scholar to a print-shop consultant! In academic publishing this has even led to the monstrosity of publishers charging outrageous ($100 or more) prices for nearly-worthless symposium-type books, to make the libraries actually pay the local faculty member's publishing costs! (He soon recommends the book for purchase by the library, and as an official he is automatically obeyed; of course a book published by an unofficial organization is quietly ignored, no matter how important.) The librarians should have cultivated all publishers and worked with them to create a computerized marketplace system like stock brokers have. Now that anybody can publish his own book with a computer what are they going to do?
On the other hand, the case of the terrible citizens groups who put pressure on them to uncatalog various items is one of the stupidest examples of misguided effort imaginable: for "banning" a knowledge item not only makes it more popular (creating a suspicion that the ideas in it might be the victim of a conspiracy against the truth), but prevents the examination and criticism that is the only effective antidote to it if it is really untruthful. (As mentioned, censorship is considered by the author as an act of war.)
Since what these groups really need is a way to catalog their reviews of an item on an equal basis with the item reviewed, this sad case can now be seen to be the ironic fault of the libraries themselves (because they make it so hard to get any locally-produced item cataloged)! With the new Knowledge Center system any special interest group can unobtrusively catalog its reviews of a knowledge item, leaving others the choice of regarding them or not.
The lack of a Knowledge Engineering activity causes materials to progressively fragment both physically and informationally. In many libraries, whole floors of books are effectively mothballed because the blinkered librarians are not aware of connections between materials; the cataloging system changed; the books were made non-circulating, or were moved to an academic department's building. Once physically separated, the many ties between materials are forgotten or made difficult to trace and physically tiring to follow.
As libraries grow, they seldom change their cataloging
practices, but rather attempt to expand the old system to
reflect the new hot spots in the collection. (For example,
the Library of Congress originally cataloged books on
Theoretical Mechanics in a subdivision of the Mathematics
Even libraries supposedly using the same cataloging system
(usually Dewey Decimal for city-run libraries and Library of
Congress for academic libraries), deviate so frequently as
to make them nearly incompatible. Yet no nationwide
cataloging system or even inventory system (with the
exception of ISBN's, which cover only a fraction of
knowledge items) is in use, despite the enormous boon to
research it would create.
And their penchant for housing their collections in a
multitude of buildings strung across the city or campus
makes a lifetime's work out of just locating needed
knowledge, much less doing anything useful with it. Had
they realized that there is no physical arrangement of
materials in separate buildings or isolated areas that "cuts
the deck" leaving few tied materials separated, they would
have long ago oriented their thinking towards library
architectures that put all materials in one continuous,
barrier-free work area, using all three dimensions to
minimize travel distance between the most closely related
subject areas: instead, as a group, librarians (especially
academic librarians) seem to prefer multiple "libraries
within the library", often in multiple geographically-remote
buildings, to create more work for themselves and hence more
jobs, titles, pensions, etc.; getting their schemes approved
by cultivating the many narrowly-specialized academic
department members who see the chance of getting the shelf
or two of books they are interested in located near their
offices, often after political-style struggles. (What do
they care about long-term research or the other library
users: they will have another job in a few years.)
Knowledge Engineering is the art, science, and technology of
knowledge delivery. The goal is to provide to any person's
fingertips the answer to the question "what is known about
x?", by working to tie together, in advance, all that is
known about "x", in-place (in the margins of books, or in
electronic "margins", using hyperlinks) without trying to
digest the knowledge and produce a half-baked theory and yet
another book the way academicians do. Ultimately, it seeks
to provide an external addition to any person's memory that
can tap into all human knowledge and add to it.
For example, knowledge engineers would never be content, as
most teachers are, with assigning homework (out of textbooks
with the answers purposely omitted), grading it, and
returning it (to certain oblivion): rather, they would
collect all the solutions, publish them in an electronic
data base, and systematically tie them in with all similar
problems in other textbooks, journals, etc., eventually
systematizing and making plain all that is known about the
subject; then making the product available universally, to
prevent future students from having to start from scratch,
and indeed giving them a common project to work on. But of
course this would make classroom teachers uncomfortable as
they begin to realize the students don't need them anymore.
One day, the knowledge would be tied into all applicable
knowledge products so that any person who encounters one of
the problems, even in disguise, would find it already solved
and waiting.
Thus, Knowledge Engineering is not just a technology of
providing computing devices, software systems, knowledge
representation schemes, learning machines, or artificial
intelligence, but it continually works with the knowledge
itself to tie it together and deliver it to any one who
knows enough to ask a question, in the asker's own language
-- and sometimes, even before the asker can ask! (Nowadays,
the main group who bill themselves as Knowledge Engineers
are certain LISP programming language specialists with a
product to sell; in future years the term is sure to be
further diluted in meaning.)
This is of course an aid to all academic research, one that
has hitherto been handled piecemeal by individuals who did
not recognize their common activities. Sadly, in the 20th
century most universities have systematically discriminated
against faculty who devoted themselves to systematizing and
redocumenting what is already known about a subject,
preferring those "researchers" who add incrementally to the
untended mountain or add new theories; some have attempted
to rectify the situation but with little success. Yet
paradoxically, virtually all products of Knowledge
Engineering (good, bad, and indifferent), such as handbooks,
guides, literature syntheses, are held in high esteem, as if
the users are starved for them! In short, lack of attention
to knowledge delivery in favor of knowledge discovery has
jeopardized the future of both.
True Knowledge Engineering is a very demanding field that is
virtually undeveloped at this time. The tying of knowledge
together requires those who can "see" better classification
schemes; who can automate what other people know (or say);
who can make plain what others wittingly or unwittingly
conceal (often through over-complication); who can navigate
apparently disparate fields of knowledge and tie them
together, bringing their professors (in the broad sense)
together also; who can keep control of a previously
processed field of knowledge well enough to completely
reorganize it overnight if needed; who can build systems
that address the same knowledge base on a variety of levels
of expertise and provide for transfer of knowledge between
the systems and the users in both directions; who can keep
on the frontiers of automation and communication technology
to keep the knowledge delivery service as cheap, fast, and
complete as possible. In short, it is a field for the most
highly-talented generalists that society can produce. (The
author is bragging.) No wonder the librarians haven't done
anything with it!
The author hereby calls for a crash nationwide program to
Knowledge Engineer the nation's libraries, beginning
immediately, even before planning for Knowledge Centers
occurs. The author hopes that in twenty years a scholar
will be able to look back to these times and pity the poor
people who had to use the library in its present form; and
that he mulls with satisfaction the fact that the present
librarians are by and large no longer working in the new
Knowledge Centers, or even working at all.
To anticipate the inevitable question arising from the fact
that the word science comes from the Latin word for
knowledge, the difference between the scientist and the
knowledge engineer is that the former discovers new
knowledge, the latter ties it into the knowledge base of
humanity. Obviously, in our present society the knowledge
engineering function is often taken over by the scientist
because the librarian is so often a dull-witted clerk or
schoolteacher who can't understand much less connect the
contents of the knowledge items he/she manages.
Since this report is not a primer on Knowledge Engineering,
the following topics will be only mentioned and those who
are interested.
1. Labelling and cataloging of knowledge
2. Levels of indirection, integration points, bypassing and
withdrawal
3. Reverse Engineering of knowledge
4. What can be tied
5. Tying versus indexing
6. Reverse indexing
7. Searching, sorting, tracing, and collating
8. The geometry of knowledge. Multi-level data bases
9. Synthesizing versus selecting versus reviewing
10. Reformulating, reconceptualizing, relanguaging
11. Who will make a good Knowledge Engineer?
The publishing industry currently does about $10 billion a
year in sales, of which about 70 percent consists of sales
to schools, libraries and book clubs, the remaining 30
percent being retail sales.
This industry is totally dominated by the physical problems
of distribution of knowledge products, creating a profound
influence on what is published. Obviously, the title,
subject matter, length, packaging, etc., are pretty much
dictated by the publishers, with "junk" books getting
preferential treatment and a great deal of duplication of
effort in republishing "classics" time and again.
Most importantly, many books never get published simply
because of the inefficient economics of publishing. The
average author of at least one published book earned only
about $5000 from writing. The author wishes to make it
perfectly clear that all of the costs associated with the
present physical packaging and distribution of knowledge are
completely wasted and a drag on the knowledge economy, and
that with the Knowledge Centers the authors will cut out a
great deal of them and maybe finally be able to make a
living at writing despite the great increase in
publications.
As mentioned previously, publishers and librarians work hand
in hand and one wonders how the public is protected from the
obvious incentives to increase the publishing industry's
sales. It must be easy for publishers to infiltrate library
purchasing staffs, to raise the price of books that
librarians have indicated an interest in buying, to stifle
efforts at book protection and repair, and so on. On the
other hand, a well-managed nationwide library system would
create a depression in the publishing industry, perhaps
backfiring on the libraries. Thus, they are in bed with
each other and must be reformed at the same time.
In the meantime, the patrons suffer from this conscious or
unconscious conspiracy that leaves library shelves devoid of
the books that the patrons want most. If books are in short
supply at the library the private citizen's remedies are to
fight the library and wait months for them to be shelved, or
to go to a bookstore and not "get involved".
As also mentioned previously, publishers by and large
manufacture their books to shoddy standards as an attempt at
planned obsolescence, even though knowledge is not a
physical product in itself and should never have to face
obsolescence.
A particularly sad scandal is the publishing industry's
refusal to plasticize their book jackets with polyester film
of a mil or two in thickness, which (when automated) would
add about 25 cents to the cost of a book but extend its life
two, three or maybe ten times. The film has extremely high
puncture and soil resistance, and when bonded to the book
jacket the spine and cover of the book are protected
indefinitely from wear, tear and soil, especially when the
plasticized jacket can be replaced for a dollar or less when
needed; this would cause the book to last until the pages
were actually wearing out rather than the cover.
Of course most libraries are run by incompetents who don't
even recognize the issue (although there are some
aftermarket companies which plasticize book jackets for
libraries), book stores don't carry anything but expensive,
ineffective book jacket covers (usually vinyl based), and
most "academic" libraries (most outrageously the Library of
Congress in Washington D.C.) actually consider it their
trademark to strip all book jackets prior to initial
shelving!
Thus, the nation's book resources are a colossal mismanaged,
decaying mess that should be a national disgrace; but of
course, the publishing industry will hardly publish,
promote, or encourage the nationwide retail sales of any
books which expose this situation or even which attempt to
describe simple book protection, preservation, and repair
techniques and materials (for other than overpriced
collector-type books). (Note: polyester film can be
purchased in rolls from artist supply houses and cut to fit
book jackets, and then taped on with a 3M tape product to be
described; the author recommends that all practice this
inexpensive technique to save their private libraries from
premature aging.)
An allied issue is the chemical industry's fear of creating
new products which will repair or protect books. A recently
introduced "miracle" product, the 3M Company's Scotch #845
Book Tape, is so poorly advertised that one must discover it
by paging through the company's catalog, even though this
product will permanently repair any torn book cover for 5 to
10 cents and perhaps extend the book's shelf life in a
library by decades.
As this product is also the most superior clear plastic tape
for general use the author has ever seen (thicker, stronger,
and more durable than regular Scotch tape), the 3M Company's
neglect of this super product is mysterious until it is
realized that it works so well that its use by the public on
their books would soon create a depression in the publishing
industry!
Clearly we have a sad conflict of interest when the
publishing industry seeks to keep itself in the business of
selling self-destructing knowledge products regardless of
what it does to the stock of the nation's knowledge
resources, not to mention the side effects leading to a
weakened economic position for the whole country.
It might be mentioned that a related scandal that the author
knows of involves not the publishing but the printing
industry, which seeks to package printer ribbons in
throw-away cartridges (at $5, $10, or even $25 each) to
increase sales when it would be easy for them to take the
cartridges back and re-ink them at a minimal cost (5 to 20
cents in ink), recycling them dozens of times before the
ribbons wear out. The only company that the author knows of
that sells an inexpensive ribbon reinking machine (Computer
Friends, Portland, OR), faces an uphill battle marketing it
as all of the major ribbon supply outlets refuse to carry
it! Hence, not only paper but ink is well deserving of a
speedy extinction!
Some may ask whether all the author has against libraries is
their management and staffing policies, and whether he can
only criticize rather than suggest solutions to the problems
of libraries and publishers. The answer is that the real
problem is not the particular people who are in this comedy
but the comedy (the library concept) itself, the present
universal disaster being easily predicted in advance.
The original concept of a public library was to purchase (at
first with private, but inevitably, tax funds) a large
collection of books and lend them to the general public for
free, bypassing the authors' royalties: the results would
be a kind of redistribution of wealth resulting in greater
economic mobility for masses of people. Unfortunately, like
all wealth redistribution schemes, it threatened to kill the
goose that laid the golden egg by cutting directly into the
incomes of the knowledge producers (authors).
At first, authors were somewhat protected by the copyright
laws and the expense involved in retypesetting and
reprinting illicit copies; but from the beginning there was
an irreconcilable conflict waiting to escalate.
With the invention of the offset press and the photocopy
machine, library materials no longer required a considerable
investment to duplicate, resulting in an intensification of
the problem which has led to a decline in libraries
generally as the knowledge producers lost all incentive to
work with them.
Now, each day that goes by sees physical knowledge items
becoming easier and cheaper to duplicate, with predictable
distortions such as journals charging libraries several
times more than individuals for subscriptions, and some
publishers selling books (at inflated prices) only to
libraries. But none of these schemes will work for long, as
the libraries can get phony individuals to subscribe for
them, and overpriced books can often be photocopied for less
than the retail prices.
Hence, neither the publishers nor the authors want to see
their works displayed in libraries, as this will surely
result in reducing their own incomes! And the libraries
don't want to do too good a job of shelving new materials,
as that might cause a depression in the publishing industry,
resulting in a poorer selection of materials in the future.
In the meantime, the entire nation, which is becoming
increasingly reliant on knowledge delivery to bolster its
worldwide economic position, is paying the price, being
actually blinded (by its mere existence) to the fact that a
public institution that claims to be delivering knowledge to
the public for free is actually weakening the knowledge
distribution economy.
The disastrous results described previously are therefore
not surprising, yet with more and more knowledge products
coming out in plastic or electronic form the situation is
bound to get much worse: libraries already are beginning to
feel guilty about stocking video tapes, computer software,
and so on.
With modern technology so readily available, the crying need
is to implement a robot inventory control system with a
computerized accounting and bookkeeping system which
automatically pays the copyright holders a royalty each time
a knowledge item is accessed in a library. (Strange that
many libraries make a point of automatically sending
royalties whenever they copy articles out of journals, but
overlook the bigger issue of lending materials.)
Of course this will mean the end of the open stack library,
but this is not much of a loss as a computerized inventory
system will let one's "fingers do the walking", and actually
permit more information about books to be provided than can
be stuffed into library shelves. (For example, all the
marketing literature, reviews, knowledge engineering data,
and so on.) And productivity will increase when a person
can sit in front of a computer and utilize its powerful
productivity tools non-stop while any needed physical
materials are delivered on computer command by robots.
For public libraries, the royalty payments can be made
from a combination of individual (user) and institution
(tax) funds, with perhaps an additional "user fee" for high
volume patrons. Every patron will have an account with the
library which is handled electronically, permitting a whole
new variety of working relationships. For example, if a
patron requests an item that has not been acquired yet, he
can choose to pay the acquisition cost for the library and
receive a "rebate" each time another patron accesses it; as
an author of a particular item, he might choose to never
formally "publish" it but rather send it in electronic (word
processor) form to libraries who sell its access to patrons
directly; and finally, all forms of knowledge will be
unified under a single management system, causing a growing
gap to be suddenly healed.
This royalty fee (which should be set by the copyright
holders themselves) does not have to be more than 25 cents
to a dollar per access (although the author doesn't wish to
be accused of attempting to set private market prices) to
completely change the libraries' future: the copyright
holders would quit shunning libraries and become their best
friends, actively seeking to get their works shelved, and
even donating them eagerly (by the boxload) to the larger
library systems; and the publishers would spare no expense
to produce books that really last. (Of course they would
sell less books, but each book would have a much greater
income potential.) This would also tend to encourage the
consolidation of public library systems on the statewide
level, ending the ridiculous fragmentation and duplication
of services in the city and college libraries.
As to private libraries, once the government has adopted
this new reform the strong market forces will encourage them
to voluntarily subscribe to the new economic arrangement,
getting a "seal of approval" from watchdog organizations to
keep on good terms with knowledge producers.
Finally, adoption of this new organization will permit a
graceful transition to the all-electronic knowledge economy
of the next century, which the author cannot conceive as
working efficiently any other way. The computerization of
libraries, therefore, is not an optional item, but
absolutely essential to their future as well as that of the
entire knowledge economy: the proposed Knowledge Centers
will automatically provide the needed reforms, as will be
seen. But first the museum and education industries, which
work hand in hand with the publishing and library
industries, must be examined.
Most libraries have trouble differentiating their mission
from that of museums. For example, most have rare book
rooms, archives, etc., where certain physical knowledge
items are physically segregated from the main stacks because
of their market value even though they thereby become almost
unusable by the patrons! (The idea never occurs to them of
making inexpensive facsimiles for the main stacks and then
selling the originals to private collectors who will take
better care of them.) Some even have what amount to art
collections.
Of course the government often uses the specious but
effective ruse of giving tax deductions for donated items
(the middle class taxpayers not realizing that they will
actually be buying the items through their increased taxes),
often resulting in inflated appraisals and other distortions
to the private economy. But this question of creeping mass
socialism should be simply academic because both libraries
and museums are equally obsolete technologically and
economically and hence deserving of speedy extinction. The
whole idea of a publicly-funded museum is, when one dissects
it, just as dubious in terms of benefits for those whom it
intends to serve: it actually results in less knowledge
being available to the average citizen through its
distortion of the private economy.
For example, the art museums always have to have original
works of art ("counterfeits" being somehow illegal despite
the ease of taking photographs of them), when for the same
money they could have a nearly comprehensive collection of
all interesting art works in facsimile. (Technology has
made it easy to make facsimiles of art works that only
experts can tell from the originals.) Hence, the public is
made to suffer a scanty selection for the sake of the
disputable benefit of viewing the originals. Of course, if
this were done there would be an uproar from the artists
whose incomes would be cut into like the writers' now are by
libraries. Again, a better approach all along would have
been to display comprehensive facsimile collections and
collect royalties to send to the artists as they are viewed.
(Of course a philanthropic artist can choose not to charge a
royalty at all.)
But like libraries, museums of any kind are simply not
needed in the coming age of individualized electronic
knowledge distribution, as comprehensive sets of pictures of
each museum item can be made, along with "curating" products
(books and movies), electronicized, and delivered to the
citizens at home electronically, the museum items then being
sold to the private economy, saving the huge costs of museum
management and associated transportation costs (as well as
the millions of wasted photos taken by the patrons!). And
since the pictures will be taken by professionals under
special lighting conditions not available inside display
cases surrounded by crowds, and be delivered at home in a
high productivity working environment (the Knowledge Center
system) the real connoisseur will come to actually prefer
them over an actual museum visit!
The court system is another outrageously inefficient system
of knowledge distribution. (The whole legal system is in
essence an information processing system, when you think
about it.)
The use of clerks to maintain ledgers in paper and ink; the
use of court stenographers who charge annoying "page fees"
for transcripts; the practice of charging idiotic filing
fees for every court action (for instance, $22 for filing,
in Denver, a change of name form which is pretty much
rubber-stamped); the physical segregation of public records
from library materials; the segregation of the supreme court
and other law libraries from the general public libraries;
the very poor use of electronic technology to record, store,
and distribute the knowledge (a person ought to be able to
get all needed public records including court records,
transcripts, license data, etc., from his home via his
personal computer on the phone lines); the complete failure
to explore the possibility of electronic courtrooms with
telecommunications used to avoid physical visits whenever
possible: these are just a sample of the obsolescence of
the current court system and need for complete overhaul soon
after the Knowledge Centers are constructed.
Ever seen a civil court proceeding where some people come
in, claim this and that, and the judge maybe wants to rule
for them, but asks them for documentation of damages and
they don't have any? Now what? If they came to court via
the Knowledge Center, the court just gets the knowledge
itself if it can, or charges the parties for the service of
getting the knowledge for them. "Court rules in favor of
plaintiff for the amount of xxx, to be later determined by
the court. Next case."
The author has saved the U.S. Postal Service for last
because the utter stupidity or at least obsolescence of its
legal monopoly of first class mail should be obvious to the
most casual observer. Not content to base its arguments for
this terrible legal abuse on the old charade of economy of
scale, its disgusting administrators recently not only filed
a lawsuit against a small private company that was doing
their job for them more cheaply, but even threatened to fine
its customers for its "lost revenues"! Since this monopoly
has been repeatedly upheld by the courts as constitutional,
however, the remedy will have to be of constitutional
proportions to be effective: the argument that it is a
clear violation of constitutional free speech rights to
force every citizen to distribute his written "speech"
through a series of government agents hasn't seemed to
persuade the robed ninnies at all. I think they even have a
trademark on the name First Class!
"Students work to pass, not to know... They do pass, and
they don't know." -- T.H. Huxley
"Education is that which remains when one has forgotten
everything learned in schools." -- A. Einstein
The current educational system is a gigantic mess. On a
nationwide level, spending on education (public and private)
is over $200 billion a year, or a whopping 20% of the gross
national product ($215 billion in 1983 vs. $70 billion in
1970). In Colorado, the K-12 public education system costs
$2 billion (28 cents of every Colorado tax dollar), or $4000
a student, per year, though a particular student may
"receive" (not directly but through a state institution)
anywhere between $3300 and $11,000 depending on which of the
state's 178 school districts he happens to live in.
Considering the well-known poor achievement level of the
K-12 students, the nation's colossal illiteracy rate, and
the fact that as many as two-thirds of high school students
are "disengaged" from the system, one wonders what happened
to the tens of thousands of dollars spent on each of them,
and indeed why their parents aren't free to spend it on them
as they see fit instead of giving it over to the care of a
public institution which spends it on their behalf (the use
of computers to create a menu of public and private
educational services, on a subject by subject basis, for
parents to engineer a curriculum for their children, at home
or any desired institution, would today be quite easy).
Certainly it is suspicious that the cost of this repeat
service does not go down each year like in every other
private industry. (For a few thousand dollars a student
could be given a powerful personal computer, and for a few
thousand more he could be given access to all the
educational knowledge products he is likely to need through
grade 12!)
Now with computing technology providing the means for
electronic education delivery and quality computer adaptive
testing, the educational bureaucracy stalls and waffles to
hinder the launching of the one-time effort that would be
required to produce a long-lasting labor-eliminating
electronicized education system. The obvious message is
that socialized education is a self-serving bureaucratic
monster that has only an oblique interest in its professed
mission.
Even the legal alternative of home education is likely to be
taken advantage of by only a few, under all kinds of
bureaucratic intrusion, when in this age of electronics the
need for expensive school facilities manned by bureaucrats
and subject to all kinds of social engineering programs
(programs which would be illegal if forced on adults) as
well as idiotic laws (such as the Colo. law prohibiting
public school students from joining fraternities), should be
the first thing to be questioned.
The following sections will analyze the system in depth and
show how it can be reformed in one blast after the Knowledge
Centers are built.
The American public school system is not a special favorite
of the author. Designed by socialists (with German
inspiration), it seems better suited to a totalitarian form
of mass socialist government despite its lying slogan of
"universal free education for free citizens" (really forced
socialization for government-dominated citizens) --
subsequent events are sure to prove that its officials are
against making it really free and universal because this
will threaten their jobs!
Its main functional form was finalized during the era of
East European immigration to the U.S., and to this day it
seems more geared towards semi-Americanizing immigrants in
large batches than towards educating free citizens. (The
Soviet Union's Communist Party loves its public school
system.)
After decades of massive operations it has turned out
generations of illiterate losers who would make the gutsy
(home-educated) colonists who started this country puke.
(This illustrates the age-old principle that a teacher can
only influence you to become like himself, which nowadays
would usually be a low-paid low-achieving loser working for
a wasteful government!)
Now its largest teacher's union -- which the author
absolutely detests -- makes no secret of being devoted to
increasing the federal government's control of education,
along with its own! (It has often been charged with being
anti-American, which it attempts to dispose of by
complaining of a "conspiracy of the religious right": now
let them try to explain the author away.)
It is sad that so many private schools pattern themselves
after the public schools, but that once again shows the
clout the government has in this century of the mass man and
highlights the need for comprehensive reform.
If you wonder why the system doesn't become the subject of
public outcry, the answer is that until the Knowledge Center
plan there was nothing to put in its place (except home
correspondence courses which don't seem to have caught on,
and TV which will be discussed later). And any official
education system will automatically take credit for the
students' growth, as if it were the cause. (As living,
growing beings, the students often have to fight the school
to achieve growth, but that is not noticed.) Also, most
parents were themselves mediocre students and thus they
never realized how things were mismanaged.
And of course there are always a few exceptional teachers in
this system who are used to justify it, although they too
were not caused by the system and would prosper better if
they could work for themselves producing educational
knowledge products for a larger market. (This is not to
ignore the large amount of protest of the public schools,
mainly for their quasi-constitutional socialization
function.)
3.3 Knowledge Engineering
3.3.1 The Knowledge Engineer Vs. the Scientist
3.3.2 Quick Primer
3.4 Publishing
3.5 How to Reform Libraries and Publishers at the Same Time
3.6 Libraries and Museums
3.7 Courts
3.8 The Postal System
4.0 Education
4.1 The Public School System
3.0 The Current U.S. Knowledge DistributionSystem
Until the rise of the World Wide Web, the established knowledge delivery industries were not doing the job. The key areas to be examined are the library, education, publishing and broadcast industries.3.1 Knowledge Delivery
3.1.1 Paper Paper has been used for centuries as the main knowledge distribution medium. It therefore has a formidable momentum, although it is virtually technologically obsolete. For purposes of completeness, the author offers the following analysis: The joys of paper: 1. Curl up with a good book 2. Make notes on the pages 3. The look, feel, smell, of a good book The sorrows of paper: 1. Burns 2. Tears and wears out 3. Dog ears (and gets dog-chewed) 4. Gets dirty 5. Costs to store and move 6. Gets lost 7. Physical restrictions on access 8. Uneven quality 9. Transmits diseases (Librarian's lung) 10. Requires ink 11. Costs plenty! Some questions about paper-based books: 1. How many different books has man published so far? 2. How many books have been written but never "published"? 3. How many "softbound" books and booklets are rejected by libraries? 4. How many books are in the world's biggest library? 5. How much per year is spent to store paper? 6. How much does wastage due to wear out, bugs, moisture, acidic paper, mishandling, etc., cost? 7. How much of the libraries' budgets is spent on labor rather than inventory? 8. How much knowledge has been lost because it was preserved only on paper? (Compare this with stone.) 9. How much would it cost to search that knowledge for all references to a single subject? 10. How many years would it take a single person merely to open each book and read the title page? 11. How many people have been killed by falling books or burned by flaming libraries? The author is just trying to suggest that we can't afford paper as a knowledge archival medium any longer, and maybe never really could. Perhaps fittingly, from the beginning the computer was hooked to a paper-and-ink printing device for communicating with humans; now it is becoming time to dispense with the paper and ink and regard computer-readable memories as the primary storage device for all human knowledge.3.2 Libraries
The end of the paper library is in sight. Unprocessable books belong in a museum. The traditional concept of the library is completely obsolete, as this report will show. How does one who has a plan for making a large government-subsidized industry obsolete overnight approach the task, especially when every year of delay is jeopardizing the entire free world's position in the 21st century? Is he to help the industry evolve and gentle recycle the obsolescence out like in a washing machine? Or is he to mount a campaign for quick, sweeping reforms that might be devastating to a few government employees but which benefit the rest of us? This section will explain why the author has chosen the latter approach, without attempting to sugar-coat the reasons or make any sort of apologies.3.2.1 The Librarians
The author makes no secret of having a generally low opinion of libraries and librarians, both of which he considers as dinosaurs deserving of speedy extinction. For those who know the story of the criminal labor racket run on him, at the behest of a gang of university librarians, by 4 police departments, 2 District Attorney's offices, and several judges in 2 courthouses, off of the University of Colorado's giant 4-campus system, to crush him economically, backed by secret orders to police, secret charges, and secret puppet show trial orders from the top 9-member governing board, in high defiance of Colorado own Organized Crime Control Act as well as the Federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and sanctioned, in cahoots with the CU Regents, by the State Governor, State Attorney General, and local federal District Attorney and FBI, for several years straight, right across the street from the Colorado State Legislative Assembly and just blocks from the U.S. Courthouse in Denver -- while they were all working as a group to steal the statehouse blind of over 900 million dollars a year, not counting millions more from Congress -- he makes no secret of wishing to crush them back, refusing to work with them further, and calling for their organization's phasing out as a matter of public policy or otherwise as soon as possible. (In Corruptorado the police state of hate, a small super-powerful group of elitists at the top actually use tax money at will to illegally pay shills by the hour to impersonate themselves, get around the constitutional restraints against abuse of power, and press sham charges against their victim to fix their wagon in an undeclared war, while they operate courts of common law behind the judge's robe like puppet theatres and try to remain in a public position of denying knowledge of their victim's name -- something that isn't on the tourist maps. Write me a song about not getting mad just getting even.) It was never a personal grudge that makes the author so determined to rid the nation of them. As an expert in knowledge delivery he considers them to be mainly standing in the way of progress. From the Library of Congress on down they are controlled by lazy, aging, and obsolete men and women and staffed with the least ambitious (except in a mean way) type of people who are always trying to make themselves indispensible. Ever since his first library visit as a child to a Denver Public Library branch in Washington Park he was both delighted by the collection of so much knowledge in one place and somewhat suspicious of something being awry that he couldn't quite put his finger on. Now that he has reached maturity and made a detailed study he can put his finger on it: there is an enormous gulf in ability level between those who create the knowledge housed in libraries and those who manage it. In contrast to other fields like the Sciences, the library field attracts only the bottom of the barrel as far as talent is concerned (mainly sexually-unattractive women, "nerds", and other societal misfits). While this might have made sense a hundred years ago, when libraries were small, few used them, the "information explosion" was in the infant stages, (and the author's ideas hadn't been published yet!) so that librarians were nothing but pitiful clerks, the author hopes this report will show how disastrous it would be to fail to wake up and change the situation in a hurry. The governmental bodies that control the bulk of the nation's libraries would do a great service for the nation if they would not only adopt this Knowledge Center concept but systematically plan for laying off all but a handful of the nation's current librari- ans in the next few decades, replacing them with a new breed of young, bright, hi-tech oriented Knowledge Engineer. The following analysis of librarians, a result of much study, is hoped by the author to be the last one that will be needed before their extinction. 1. The massive government support of libraries has resulted in their becoming make-work projects for society's losers, usually those who, despite a "higher education", can't find jobs in the private sector, much less start their own successful companies. (They always want "secure jobs".) 2. As a group librarians cultivate a phony public image as intellectuals (people who are educated beyond their intelligence) who are out to enlighten society and raise the cultural level of the town's yokels (as in the film The Music Man, 1962) and who are always on the receiving end in dealings with the government whose abuses they are supposed to be protecting us from. One famous Twilight Zone episode, The Obsolete Man, (1961), pitted one poor librarian against the entire government! The episode prophetically portrayed a future time when the government would declare all librarians as obsolete, an anachronism from another time.) 3. The truth is that many of the nation's largest libraries are run by governments and are filled with the same kind of dull, lazy bureaucrats that one finds everywhere; as bureaucrats they are instinctive abusers of private citizens as the author has abundantly proved to his own satisfaction (see Report #KC-85-001). (A recent example: when the Library of Congress faced a 1986 budget reduction of five percent because of the Gramm-Rudman act, they promptly announced their buildings would be closed to the public during most of the evenings and weekends!) Naturally, as hierarchical organizations there is much power-grabbing, back-stabbing, and so on, often resulting in the scum rising to the top. Their operations are generally characterized by massive inefficiency and waste, stupidity at all levels, civil service style featherbedding (compartmentalizing each employee to justify idleness once his "duties" are finished; complete neglect of the maintenance of their collections while the top administrators frequent vacation-type conferences), a general disregard for the patrons, running the libraries for the staff rather than for them (for instance, laying the materials out to minimize their time rather than that of the patrons), and in general illustrating the law that all organizations seek to maintain their existence and increase their dominion regardless of the reason for their creation. 4. And as a kind of factory, a library reminds the author of a unionized plant that is a sitting duck for an efficiency expert to come in and study. [But bring your own army with you in Colorado, the police are corrupt tools of the librarians in that police state and they want to keep things just the way they are!] 5. As to private libraries, the domination of the library business by government institutions means that they must often get much of their staffs from government libraries. (No wonder the author can't find a single private library to hold up as a counterexample.) 6. A recent UPI article (which was obviously a publicity stunt for the nation's major library association, which is very publicity conscious) says there are 15K public, 88K school, 10K special (medical, legal, corporate), and 3K academic libraries in the U.S.; and then mentions that the 15K public libraries garner a total of 15.5 M visits, or 1K per library, each week. The very way this data is presented highlights exactly what is wrong with the librarians: they run the libraries for the bureaucrats who are interested in a head count to justify budgets rather than for the patrons who are interested in finding knowledge. (More light would have been shed by the number of people in the U.S. who are using libraries regularly, the number of knowledge items found by them per hour of time spent searching, and per calendar week, and the number of knowledge items searched for but not found even though they were present.) 7. These monumental forest graveyards (storing trapped sunlight) don't even seem to know what business they are in anymore. The UPI article just mentioned describes libraries that now loan prom dresses, electric typewriters, sewing machines, post-hole diggers, sanders, auto jacks, and hedge trimmers! Many now give classes, lectures, and so on, as if they were educational institutions. And virtually all of them consider themselves as museums for physical knowledge products such as fine or rare books, personal papers, and so on -- as if they worship the physical form of knowledge products rather than the knowledge itself. (It is recommended that the state separate libraries from the museum business, and sell off their holdings to private collectors where they belong, after making facsimilies for their collections: a "book museum" being a poor idea because few would want to visit it.) 8. Their main responsibility, preserving knowledge, however, often goes completely neglected. For example, many libraries have retirement or "weeding" programs to actually discard books based on hazy criteria (the lack of shelf space often being a result of years of padded payrolls that have left nothing for the building fund). They never have attempted to influence (or at least succeeded in influencing) the standards of publishers, allowing them to use acidic paper for decades, and now letting them produce flimsy bindings without even simple polyester book jacket covers, an obvious plan on their part to boost sales through planned obsolescence even though it jeopardizes the nation's knowledge base. Even book repair programs are frequently non-existent. And of course libraries spend more of their budgets for unnecessary (but seemingly busy) employees than for materials. The Denver Public Library has over 300 employees to man a library with 3.5 million items, or one employee for only 10,000 items; after a recent "reorganization" this bloated workforce was instructed to actually "roam the floors, greeting people and volunteering their services!" No wonder only ten percent of their budget actually goes for new materials! Finally, they seem to have no organized plan for the systematic, coordinated collection of knowledge, leaving that to academics who have no comprehensive vision. For example, where in a public Colorado library can one find the complete works, in English, of the Church fathers, or a complete set of Bibles in all translations; a complete set of writings from natural philosophers of the last 500 years, indexed and translated; a complete collection of newspapers published in Colorado since 1859; a complete set of textbooks used in Colorado's classroom schools since 1900, or school yearbooks; a collection of religious and political pamphlets, including campaign literature, published in Colorado; a set of photographs of Denver's skyline for each year since its founding; a set of past Colorado radio and TV broadcasts; or even a complete set of Time and Newsweek! Chances are that the works of the Church fathers have not all even been translated yet; the writings of the natural philosophers have not even been all identified; the newspapers, textbooks, and yearbooks are scattered to the four winds; the broadcasts are only accessible from deep outer space; the sets of Time and Newsweek at the Denver Public Library were not backed up with spare copies in a state warehouse to counter the inevitable abuse; the photographs are in a multitude of private hands; and the pamphlets were probably discarded by the librarians, as they received them, as being either too "unimportant" or "controversial"! If even one year's expenditure on library staff salaries could be diverted to systematic knowledge collection, many of these deficiencies could easily be corrected. 8. Now, with the revolutions occurring on almost a yearly basis in electronic knowledge delivery, these bureaucrats either ignore or fear the new technology, especially when it might automate their jobs out of existence. A recent newspaper article even revealed that present "professional" librarians, who are by and large untrained in hi-tech, actually believe that electronic knowledge is to be more or less avoided rather than planned for and made the main storage medium! (They instead prefer knowledge in edible form for the bookworms.) 9. Another problem with the current library system is the tyrannical control some administrators exercise over multi-million dollar public resources. Ultimately there may be too much power in too few hands, and abuses. 10. That this is a real danger is evident when one considers that the nation's libraries reach into every nook and cranny of the nation, they have their noses in almost every government funding trough, their officials often enjoy semi-anonymity and are likewise often untouchable by local politicians, they as a group control much of the nation's knowledge resources, and as government bureaucrats they enjoy an astonishing longevity in office, which, combined with their "one for all, all for one" policy and "us/them" attitude (with the general public as "them"), makes it easy for them to become in-bred and power hungry. Finally, as bureaucrats and marketplace losers or dropouts they tend to almost instinctively oppose free enterprise, consciously or subconsciously; hence, they are a likely tool for takeover and use by socialist and communist groups. 11. Considering the poor job libraries do in preserving and protecting books, providing a comprehensive collection, and in encouraging free interchange of opinions among patrons, it is almost as if libraries have become concentration camps for books, whose wardens carry on phony publicity campaigns with staged photographs to avert public suspicions. When the author sees these campaigns, often featuring celebrities exhorting children to read books but never mentioning the poor job libraries do in delivering knowledge to children or anyone else, the irony is enough to heat his collar. (Like all bureaucrats, their true aim is control of the nation's knowledge resources, however inefficient they are in managing them; this is why they seek to portray themselves as valiant fighters against illiteracy and poor cultural attainment, hoping the public will give them more power or funds when it ought to be obvious their programs will only amount to "window dressing".) 12. Besides their general unfitness for their responsibilities, the librarians are collectively guilty of failing to "knowledge engineer" their libraries to make their use a thousand times more profitable for the patrons. Although the following three sections present the same message in only slightly different ways, the author believes it is so important he had to drive it home.3.2.2 The Knowledge Engineering Opportunity That Was Missed
As the libraries grow to the size of mountains, they naturally become an object of study in themselves. In fact, it is now sadly unavoidable that a searcher for knowledge become an expert on the library. One of the first things that strikes the researcher is the enormous difficulty of merely finding out what there is in the mountain, and where it is. Reducing this difficulty should be the primary task of librarians. But after centuries of operation of libraries in this country, the nature of the librarians' jobs has changed little if at all: they purchase, (poorly) catalog, and shelve books, leaving the library patrons to fend for themselves in what amounts to an undeveloped resource. For example, after cataloging each book one would think that the librarians would open it up to the bibliography and pencil in the call number of each item listed there, saving each of the book's readers from the work of repeating the process; or that they would look through journals for book reviews and then pencil a notice into the reviewed book pointing to the journal, again saving the many readers of the book from hours of search (if they find it at all). Yet the librarians treat books as "black boxes" whose contents they refuse to "look into" or tolerate any "tampering" with. Some even adopt the attitude of museum curators who balk if someone merely dusts off a statue, although most books are in open stacks and may even be worked on at home. (Instead, they should have been beehives of activity by all, the modern-day Pyramids.) The net result is that most users of libraries bypass them as resources to directly add value to, preferring to hoard their work and publish yet another book. Thus, the library now consists of masses of books that all "point" to each other directly or indirectly, with the "pointers" either "listed" in some "index" (for example, book review indexes) or missing entirely. Thus, each and every library patron must spend a significant fraction of his time in effect repeating searches that others have made before but which have left no trace. It is no wonder that they call it "research"! Of course, the librarians, who have assisted the patrons time and again with virtually the same searches, prefer to carry their knowledge around in their heads to justify their own jobs, rather than putting it into the library itself. It is the author's opinion that the field of library science (the collective wisdom of the librarians, made into a phony academic discipline about as legitimate as the Sears Roebuck catalog system) is a worldwide disgrace. An effort to knowledge engineer library collections by tying the materials together with hyperlinks (pencilled-in references) should have been started on a national scale a hundred years ago, and by now there should be a national professional association, a worldwide data network, and so on. Fortunately the WWW has made paper libraries obsolescent, so now hyperlinks can be made electronic. The loss in the patron's time caused by needless searching for knowledge, and missed learning opportunities, surely has affected the economy of the world in a major way: and it was all the fault of librarians.3.2.5 The Real Mission of Libraries
The real mission of libraries is: To deliver universal knowledge to the citizens on demand, efficiently. To be: 1. Society's memory bank. 2. Research center on any subject. 3. Educational (and self-educational) resource. 4. Business resource. 5. Conduit of the knowledge economy. 6. Tool of the knowledge economy. 7. Lifelong knowledge workshop and repository for all citizens. NOT to be: 1. A private empire for bureaucrats. 2. A source of employment for them. 3. A propaganda center with "censors". 4. A repository of "official, approved" knowledge only. 5. A place to take from, but not add to (except indirectly). 6. An omnibus social center, museum, literature appreciation society, "Abbey Rents", or whatever.3.2.6 Other Gripes
Usually, anything controversial is as taboo as certain language subsets or dialects (dirty language), unless contained in a publication of one of the official publishers. (Of course the libraries' public relations often brag about their shelving of banned books, mainly when they reach a certain ripe old age and are not really that controversial any more, as evidenced by their publication by the official publishers: meanwhile, the really controversial materials are still banned -- for instance, anti-government reports.) The author, as a true man of knowledge, favors collecting all knowledge without judgement, as those who are offended by it don't have to look at it. We were already thrown out of Paradise once for wanting to know as much as the gods: it's too late to go back now. Why does one have to resort to private distribution channels to get certain kinds of knowledge products when the public library has arbitrarily suppressed them? (This is especially true when the materials are donated but deliberately suppressed by librarians.) For example: "pornography" (human sexual activity picture knowledge, or, essentially, knowledge of human skin; if it were of animals it would be all right!); "hate literature" (a human emotion that we all have but don't want to give its due, as evidenced by the outright hatred shown by one-sided "anti", e.g., anti-Nazi, anti-Communist, anti-sexist literature which is nevertheless considered proper and worth cataloging, while much "pro", e.g., pro-Nazi literature, is banned); "occult-psychic-otherworld literature" (which is often more imaginative and entertaining than admitted fiction, even if not true); "extremist" political and religious literature (for the often unique perspectives); and the new "heresy", so-called "racist" literature (usually meaning anything that is pro-white, material in favor of other racial groups or against the white race being all right.) Some may object that they have a war on with certain groups, but this war, unless officially declared by the government, should not be allowed to include actual suppression of access to materials, and ironically in that case the librarians should catalog such materials all the more freely, as the end of any war lies in more, not less knowledge! In the author's opinion, suppression of thought is the greatest of all crimes, much more serious than theft or murder, which "kills the body but not the soul", and hence its "legalization" should be subject to at least the same procedures as war, which legalizes theft and murder; yet, believe it or not, it is often the "pacifist" groups that cry the loudest for suppression of certain library materials! Strangely, also neglected or banned is commercial promotional literature for the very knowledge items they collect, including (at academic libraries especially) the book jackets, even when they are fundamental to the physical protection of the books. Hence the books are stripped of their often valuable "sales pitches", leaving the poor patrons with a colorless, lifeless, economically-isolated world to work in, despite the works themselves having been subject to a multitude of economic pressures that affect their content, length, style, etc. The libraries provide little or no means for inter-patron communication, other than by publishing a new book through official channels and getting it cataloged. This leads to a sterilization of the library that drives thinking (and hence highly communicative) people away and creates a mausoleum-type atmosphere. (The ideal for these bureaucrats is a long, lazy day where a few cute children and courteous, respectful adults come in, walk straight to them, ask them for a book, and then leave in a hurry, without messing the stacks up, leaving them in complete charge of the building like temple attendants.) They should have provided for rapid cataloging and shelving of the works of patrons, in whatever form, and for their as rapid withdrawal or replacement on request, turning the library into a free forum of new ideas as well as a source of officially "published" knowledge. (A case in point is this report, which should be rapidly purchased and cataloged by every library -- watch how good they do). Now with computers the difference between the publishers and the patrons should all-but disappear as patrons publish and catalog books entirely by computer, but only after a way to make a "cyberlibrary" is adopted and becomes univerally accepted. The libraries are often run like closely-guarded museums, with eyes peering in all directions (despite theft running into the thousands per month), when they should have built as much rentable office space as possible right in the library buildings, to encourage people of all kinds to literally move in and feel at home. (It is those who rarely visit libraries who are most likely to want to vandalize or steal from them, those who use them regularly being the best form of policemen!) The librarians do everything to discourage graffiti and anonymous publications, when they should actually have tried to encourage them, by providing blackboards all over the place, and "patron literature" racks, for instance: the level of discourse would quickly become elevated and probably quite serious when no longer illegal. (In at least one famous Physics institute the author knows, blackboards are provided along all the halls for similar reasons.) Like typical bureaucrats librarians seek to decrease the number of their interfaces by restricting their purchasing decisions to a chosen few experts and a chosen few publishers -- truly reducing the scholar to a print-shop consultant! In academic publishing this has even led to the monstrosity of publishers charging outrageous ($100 or more) prices for nearly-worthless symposium-type books, to make the libraries actually pay the local faculty member's publishing costs! (He soon recommends the book for purchase by the library, and as an official he is automatically obeyed; of course a book published by an unofficial organization is quietly ignored, no matter how important.) The librarians should have cultivated all publishers and worked with them to create a computerized marketplace system like stock brokers have. Now that anybody can publish his own book with a computer what are they going to do? On the other hand, the case of the terrible citizens groups who put pressure on them to uncatalog various items is one of the stupidest examples of misguided effort imaginable: for "banning" a knowledge item not only makes it more popular (creating a suspicion that the ideas in it might be the victim of a conspiracy against the truth), but prevents the examination and criticism that is the only effective antidote to it if it is really untruthful. (As mentioned, censorship is considered by the author as an act of war.) Since what these groups really need is a way to catalog their reviews of an item on an equal basis with the item reviewed, this sad case can now be seen to be the ironic fault of the libraries themselves (because they make it so hard to get any locally-produced item cataloged)! With the new Knowledge Center system any special interest group can unobtrusively catalog its reviews of a knowledge item, leaving others the choice of regarding them or not. The lack of a Knowledge Engineering activity causes materials to progressively fragment both physically and informationally. In many libraries, whole floors of books are effectively mothballed because the blinkered librarians are not aware of connections between materials; the cataloging system changed; the books were made non-circulating, or were moved to an academic department's building. Once physically separated, the many ties between materials are forgotten or made difficult to trace and physically tiring to follow. As libraries grow, they seldom change their cataloging practices, but rather attempt to expand the old system to reflect the new hot spots in the collection. (For example, the Library of Congress originally cataloged books on Theoretical Mechanics in a subdivision of the Mathematics3.3 Knowledge Engineering
Knowledge Engineering is the art, science, and technology of knowledge delivery. The goal is to provide to any person's fingertips the answer to the question "what is known about x?", by working to tie together, in advance, all that is known about "x", in-place (in the margins of books, or in electronic "margins", using hyperlinks) without trying to digest the knowledge and produce a half-baked theory and yet another book the way academicians do. Ultimately, it seeks to provide an external addition to any person's memory that can tap into all human knowledge and add to it. For example, knowledge engineers would never be content, as most teachers are, with assigning homework (out of textbooks with the answers purposely omitted), grading it, and returning it (to certain oblivion): rather, they would collect all the solutions, publish them in an electronic data base, and systematically tie them in with all similar problems in other textbooks, journals, etc., eventually systematizing and making plain all that is known about the subject; then making the product available universally, to prevent future students from having to start from scratch, and indeed giving them a common project to work on. But of course this would make classroom teachers uncomfortable as they begin to realize the students don't need them anymore. One day, the knowledge would be tied into all applicable knowledge products so that any person who encounters one of the problems, even in disguise, would find it already solved and waiting. Thus, Knowledge Engineering is not just a technology of providing computing devices, software systems, knowledge representation schemes, learning machines, or artificial intelligence, but it continually works with the knowledge itself to tie it together and deliver it to any one who knows enough to ask a question, in the asker's own language -- and sometimes, even before the asker can ask! (Nowadays, the main group who bill themselves as Knowledge Engineers are certain LISP programming language specialists with a product to sell; in future years the term is sure to be further diluted in meaning.) This is of course an aid to all academic research, one that has hitherto been handled piecemeal by individuals who did not recognize their common activities. Sadly, in the 20th century most universities have systematically discriminated against faculty who devoted themselves to systematizing and redocumenting what is already known about a subject, preferring those "researchers" who add incrementally to the untended mountain or add new theories; some have attempted to rectify the situation but with little success. Yet paradoxically, virtually all products of Knowledge Engineering (good, bad, and indifferent), such as handbooks, guides, literature syntheses, are held in high esteem, as if the users are starved for them! In short, lack of attention to knowledge delivery in favor of knowledge discovery has jeopardized the future of both. True Knowledge Engineering is a very demanding field that is virtually undeveloped at this time. The tying of knowledge together requires those who can "see" better classification schemes; who can automate what other people know (or say); who can make plain what others wittingly or unwittingly conceal (often through over-complication); who can navigate apparently disparate fields of knowledge and tie them together, bringing their professors (in the broad sense) together also; who can keep control of a previously processed field of knowledge well enough to completely reorganize it overnight if needed; who can build systems that address the same knowledge base on a variety of levels of expertise and provide for transfer of knowledge between the systems and the users in both directions; who can keep on the frontiers of automation and communication technology to keep the knowledge delivery service as cheap, fast, and complete as possible. In short, it is a field for the most highly-talented generalists that society can produce. (The author is bragging.) No wonder the librarians haven't done anything with it! The author hereby calls for a crash nationwide program to Knowledge Engineer the nation's libraries, beginning immediately, even before planning for Knowledge Centers occurs. The author hopes that in twenty years a scholar will be able to look back to these times and pity the poor people who had to use the library in its present form; and that he mulls with satisfaction the fact that the present librarians are by and large no longer working in the new Knowledge Centers, or even working at all.3.3.1 The Knowledge Engineer Vs. the Scientist
To anticipate the inevitable question arising from the fact that the word science comes from the Latin word for knowledge, the difference between the scientist and the knowledge engineer is that the former discovers new knowledge, the latter ties it into the knowledge base of humanity. Obviously, in our present society the knowledge engineering function is often taken over by the scientist because the librarian is so often a dull-witted clerk or schoolteacher who can't understand much less connect the contents of the knowledge items he/she manages.3.3.2 Quick Primer
Since this report is not a primer on Knowledge Engineering, the following topics will be only mentioned and those who are interested. 1. Labelling and cataloging of knowledge 2. Levels of indirection, integration points, bypassing and withdrawal 3. Reverse Engineering of knowledge 4. What can be tied 5. Tying versus indexing 6. Reverse indexing 7. Searching, sorting, tracing, and collating 8. The geometry of knowledge. Multi-level data bases 9. Synthesizing versus selecting versus reviewing 10. Reformulating, reconceptualizing, relanguaging 11. Who will make a good Knowledge Engineer?3.4 Publishing
The publishing industry currently does about $10 billion a year in sales, of which about 70 percent consists of sales to schools, libraries and book clubs, the remaining 30 percent being retail sales. This industry is totally dominated by the physical problems of distribution of knowledge products, creating a profound influence on what is published. Obviously, the title, subject matter, length, packaging, etc., are pretty much dictated by the publishers, with "junk" books getting preferential treatment and a great deal of duplication of effort in republishing "classics" time and again. Most importantly, many books never get published simply because of the inefficient economics of publishing. The average author of at least one published book earned only about $5000 from writing. The author wishes to make it perfectly clear that all of the costs associated with the present physical packaging and distribution of knowledge are completely wasted and a drag on the knowledge economy, and that with the Knowledge Centers the authors will cut out a great deal of them and maybe finally be able to make a living at writing despite the great increase in publications. As mentioned previously, publishers and librarians work hand in hand and one wonders how the public is protected from the obvious incentives to increase the publishing industry's sales. It must be easy for publishers to infiltrate library purchasing staffs, to raise the price of books that librarians have indicated an interest in buying, to stifle efforts at book protection and repair, and so on. On the other hand, a well-managed nationwide library system would create a depression in the publishing industry, perhaps backfiring on the libraries. Thus, they are in bed with each other and must be reformed at the same time. In the meantime, the patrons suffer from this conscious or unconscious conspiracy that leaves library shelves devoid of the books that the patrons want most. If books are in short supply at the library the private citizen's remedies are to fight the library and wait months for them to be shelved, or to go to a bookstore and not "get involved". As also mentioned previously, publishers by and large manufacture their books to shoddy standards as an attempt at planned obsolescence, even though knowledge is not a physical product in itself and should never have to face obsolescence. A particularly sad scandal is the publishing industry's refusal to plasticize their book jackets with polyester film of a mil or two in thickness, which (when automated) would add about 25 cents to the cost of a book but extend its life two, three or maybe ten times. The film has extremely high puncture and soil resistance, and when bonded to the book jacket the spine and cover of the book are protected indefinitely from wear, tear and soil, especially when the plasticized jacket can be replaced for a dollar or less when needed; this would cause the book to last until the pages were actually wearing out rather than the cover. Of course most libraries are run by incompetents who don't even recognize the issue (although there are some aftermarket companies which plasticize book jackets for libraries), book stores don't carry anything but expensive, ineffective book jacket covers (usually vinyl based), and most "academic" libraries (most outrageously the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.) actually consider it their trademark to strip all book jackets prior to initial shelving! Thus, the nation's book resources are a colossal mismanaged, decaying mess that should be a national disgrace; but of course, the publishing industry will hardly publish, promote, or encourage the nationwide retail sales of any books which expose this situation or even which attempt to describe simple book protection, preservation, and repair techniques and materials (for other than overpriced collector-type books). (Note: polyester film can be purchased in rolls from artist supply houses and cut to fit book jackets, and then taped on with a 3M tape product to be described; the author recommends that all practice this inexpensive technique to save their private libraries from premature aging.) An allied issue is the chemical industry's fear of creating new products which will repair or protect books. A recently introduced "miracle" product, the 3M Company's Scotch #845 Book Tape, is so poorly advertised that one must discover it by paging through the company's catalog, even though this product will permanently repair any torn book cover for 5 to 10 cents and perhaps extend the book's shelf life in a library by decades. As this product is also the most superior clear plastic tape for general use the author has ever seen (thicker, stronger, and more durable than regular Scotch tape), the 3M Company's neglect of this super product is mysterious until it is realized that it works so well that its use by the public on their books would soon create a depression in the publishing industry! Clearly we have a sad conflict of interest when the publishing industry seeks to keep itself in the business of selling self-destructing knowledge products regardless of what it does to the stock of the nation's knowledge resources, not to mention the side effects leading to a weakened economic position for the whole country. It might be mentioned that a related scandal that the author knows of involves not the publishing but the printing industry, which seeks to package printer ribbons in throw-away cartridges (at $5, $10, or even $25 each) to increase sales when it would be easy for them to take the cartridges back and re-ink them at a minimal cost (5 to 20 cents in ink), recycling them dozens of times before the ribbons wear out. The only company that the author knows of that sells an inexpensive ribbon reinking machine (Computer Friends, Portland, OR), faces an uphill battle marketing it as all of the major ribbon supply outlets refuse to carry it! Hence, not only paper but ink is well deserving of a speedy extinction!3.5 How to Reform Libraries and Publishers at the Same Time
Some may ask whether all the author has against libraries is their management and staffing policies, and whether he can only criticize rather than suggest solutions to the problems of libraries and publishers. The answer is that the real problem is not the particular people who are in this comedy but the comedy (the library concept) itself, the present universal disaster being easily predicted in advance. The original concept of a public library was to purchase (at first with private, but inevitably, tax funds) a large collection of books and lend them to the general public for free, bypassing the authors' royalties: the results would be a kind of redistribution of wealth resulting in greater economic mobility for masses of people. Unfortunately, like all wealth redistribution schemes, it threatened to kill the goose that laid the golden egg by cutting directly into the incomes of the knowledge producers (authors). At first, authors were somewhat protected by the copyright laws and the expense involved in retypesetting and reprinting illicit copies; but from the beginning there was an irreconcilable conflict waiting to escalate. With the invention of the offset press and the photocopy machine, library materials no longer required a considerable investment to duplicate, resulting in an intensification of the problem which has led to a decline in libraries generally as the knowledge producers lost all incentive to work with them. Now, each day that goes by sees physical knowledge items becoming easier and cheaper to duplicate, with predictable distortions such as journals charging libraries several times more than individuals for subscriptions, and some publishers selling books (at inflated prices) only to libraries. But none of these schemes will work for long, as the libraries can get phony individuals to subscribe for them, and overpriced books can often be photocopied for less than the retail prices. Hence, neither the publishers nor the authors want to see their works displayed in libraries, as this will surely result in reducing their own incomes! And the libraries don't want to do too good a job of shelving new materials, as that might cause a depression in the publishing industry, resulting in a poorer selection of materials in the future. In the meantime, the entire nation, which is becoming increasingly reliant on knowledge delivery to bolster its worldwide economic position, is paying the price, being actually blinded (by its mere existence) to the fact that a public institution that claims to be delivering knowledge to the public for free is actually weakening the knowledge distribution economy. The disastrous results described previously are therefore not surprising, yet with more and more knowledge products coming out in plastic or electronic form the situation is bound to get much worse: libraries already are beginning to feel guilty about stocking video tapes, computer software, and so on. With modern technology so readily available, the crying need is to implement a robot inventory control system with a computerized accounting and bookkeeping system which automatically pays the copyright holders a royalty each time a knowledge item is accessed in a library. (Strange that many libraries make a point of automatically sending royalties whenever they copy articles out of journals, but overlook the bigger issue of lending materials.) Of course this will mean the end of the open stack library, but this is not much of a loss as a computerized inventory system will let one's "fingers do the walking", and actually permit more information about books to be provided than can be stuffed into library shelves. (For example, all the marketing literature, reviews, knowledge engineering data, and so on.) And productivity will increase when a person can sit in front of a computer and utilize its powerful productivity tools non-stop while any needed physical materials are delivered on computer command by robots. For public libraries, the royalty payments can be made from a combination of individual (user) and institution (tax) funds, with perhaps an additional "user fee" for high volume patrons. Every patron will have an account with the library which is handled electronically, permitting a whole new variety of working relationships. For example, if a patron requests an item that has not been acquired yet, he can choose to pay the acquisition cost for the library and receive a "rebate" each time another patron accesses it; as an author of a particular item, he might choose to never formally "publish" it but rather send it in electronic (word processor) form to libraries who sell its access to patrons directly; and finally, all forms of knowledge will be unified under a single management system, causing a growing gap to be suddenly healed. This royalty fee (which should be set by the copyright holders themselves) does not have to be more than 25 cents to a dollar per access (although the author doesn't wish to be accused of attempting to set private market prices) to completely change the libraries' future: the copyright holders would quit shunning libraries and become their best friends, actively seeking to get their works shelved, and even donating them eagerly (by the boxload) to the larger library systems; and the publishers would spare no expense to produce books that really last. (Of course they would sell less books, but each book would have a much greater income potential.) This would also tend to encourage the consolidation of public library systems on the statewide level, ending the ridiculous fragmentation and duplication of services in the city and college libraries. As to private libraries, once the government has adopted this new reform the strong market forces will encourage them to voluntarily subscribe to the new economic arrangement, getting a "seal of approval" from watchdog organizations to keep on good terms with knowledge producers. Finally, adoption of this new organization will permit a graceful transition to the all-electronic knowledge economy of the next century, which the author cannot conceive as working efficiently any other way. The computerization of libraries, therefore, is not an optional item, but absolutely essential to their future as well as that of the entire knowledge economy: the proposed Knowledge Centers will automatically provide the needed reforms, as will be seen. But first the museum and education industries, which work hand in hand with the publishing and library industries, must be examined.3.6 Libraries and Museums
Most libraries have trouble differentiating their mission from that of museums. For example, most have rare book rooms, archives, etc., where certain physical knowledge items are physically segregated from the main stacks because of their market value even though they thereby become almost unusable by the patrons! (The idea never occurs to them of making inexpensive facsimiles for the main stacks and then selling the originals to private collectors who will take better care of them.) Some even have what amount to art collections. Of course the government often uses the specious but effective ruse of giving tax deductions for donated items (the middle class taxpayers not realizing that they will actually be buying the items through their increased taxes), often resulting in inflated appraisals and other distortions to the private economy. But this question of creeping mass socialism should be simply academic because both libraries and museums are equally obsolete technologically and economically and hence deserving of speedy extinction. The whole idea of a publicly-funded museum is, when one dissects it, just as dubious in terms of benefits for those whom it intends to serve: it actually results in less knowledge being available to the average citizen through its distortion of the private economy. For example, the art museums always have to have original works of art ("counterfeits" being somehow illegal despite the ease of taking photographs of them), when for the same money they could have a nearly comprehensive collection of all interesting art works in facsimile. (Technology has made it easy to make facsimiles of art works that only experts can tell from the originals.) Hence, the public is made to suffer a scanty selection for the sake of the disputable benefit of viewing the originals. Of course, if this were done there would be an uproar from the artists whose incomes would be cut into like the writers' now are by libraries. Again, a better approach all along would have been to display comprehensive facsimile collections and collect royalties to send to the artists as they are viewed. (Of course a philanthropic artist can choose not to charge a royalty at all.) But like libraries, museums of any kind are simply not needed in the coming age of individualized electronic knowledge distribution, as comprehensive sets of pictures of each museum item can be made, along with "curating" products (books and movies), electronicized, and delivered to the citizens at home electronically, the museum items then being sold to the private economy, saving the huge costs of museum management and associated transportation costs (as well as the millions of wasted photos taken by the patrons!). And since the pictures will be taken by professionals under special lighting conditions not available inside display cases surrounded by crowds, and be delivered at home in a high productivity working environment (the Knowledge Center system) the real connoisseur will come to actually prefer them over an actual museum visit!3.7 Courts
The court system is another outrageously inefficient system of knowledge distribution. (The whole legal system is in essence an information processing system, when you think about it.) The use of clerks to maintain ledgers in paper and ink; the use of court stenographers who charge annoying "page fees" for transcripts; the practice of charging idiotic filing fees for every court action (for instance, $22 for filing, in Denver, a change of name form which is pretty much rubber-stamped); the physical segregation of public records from library materials; the segregation of the supreme court and other law libraries from the general public libraries; the very poor use of electronic technology to record, store, and distribute the knowledge (a person ought to be able to get all needed public records including court records, transcripts, license data, etc., from his home via his personal computer on the phone lines); the complete failure to explore the possibility of electronic courtrooms with telecommunications used to avoid physical visits whenever possible: these are just a sample of the obsolescence of the current court system and need for complete overhaul soon after the Knowledge Centers are constructed. Ever seen a civil court proceeding where some people come in, claim this and that, and the judge maybe wants to rule for them, but asks them for documentation of damages and they don't have any? Now what? If they came to court via the Knowledge Center, the court just gets the knowledge itself if it can, or charges the parties for the service of getting the knowledge for them. "Court rules in favor of plaintiff for the amount of xxx, to be later determined by the court. Next case."3.8 The Postal System
The author has saved the U.S. Postal Service for last because the utter stupidity or at least obsolescence of its legal monopoly of first class mail should be obvious to the most casual observer. Not content to base its arguments for this terrible legal abuse on the old charade of economy of scale, its disgusting administrators recently not only filed a lawsuit against a small private company that was doing their job for them more cheaply, but even threatened to fine its customers for its "lost revenues"! Since this monopoly has been repeatedly upheld by the courts as constitutional, however, the remedy will have to be of constitutional proportions to be effective: the argument that it is a clear violation of constitutional free speech rights to force every citizen to distribute his written "speech" through a series of government agents hasn't seemed to persuade the robed ninnies at all. I think they even have a trademark on the name First Class!4.0 Education
"Students work to pass, not to know... They do pass, and they don't know." -- T.H. Huxley "Education is that which remains when one has forgotten everything learned in schools." -- A. Einstein The current educational system is a gigantic mess. On a nationwide level, spending on education (public and private) is over $200 billion a year, or a whopping 20% of the gross national product ($215 billion in 1983 vs. $70 billion in 1970). In Colorado, the K-12 public education system costs $2 billion (28 cents of every Colorado tax dollar), or $4000 a student, per year, though a particular student may "receive" (not directly but through a state institution) anywhere between $3300 and $11,000 depending on which of the state's 178 school districts he happens to live in. Considering the well-known poor achievement level of the K-12 students, the nation's colossal illiteracy rate, and the fact that as many as two-thirds of high school students are "disengaged" from the system, one wonders what happened to the tens of thousands of dollars spent on each of them, and indeed why their parents aren't free to spend it on them as they see fit instead of giving it over to the care of a public institution which spends it on their behalf (the use of computers to create a menu of public and private educational services, on a subject by subject basis, for parents to engineer a curriculum for their children, at home or any desired institution, would today be quite easy). Certainly it is suspicious that the cost of this repeat service does not go down each year like in every other private industry. (For a few thousand dollars a student could be given a powerful personal computer, and for a few thousand more he could be given access to all the educational knowledge products he is likely to need through grade 12!) Now with computing technology providing the means for electronic education delivery and quality computer adaptive testing, the educational bureaucracy stalls and waffles to hinder the launching of the one-time effort that would be required to produce a long-lasting labor-eliminating electronicized education system. The obvious message is that socialized education is a self-serving bureaucratic monster that has only an oblique interest in its professed mission. Even the legal alternative of home education is likely to be taken advantage of by only a few, under all kinds of bureaucratic intrusion, when in this age of electronics the need for expensive school facilities manned by bureaucrats and subject to all kinds of social engineering programs (programs which would be illegal if forced on adults) as well as idiotic laws (such as the Colo. law prohibiting public school students from joining fraternities), should be the first thing to be questioned. The following sections will analyze the system in depth and show how it can be reformed in one blast after the Knowledge Centers are built.4.1 The Public School System
The American public school system is not a special favorite of the author. Designed by socialists (with German inspiration), it seems better suited to a totalitarian form of mass socialist government despite its lying slogan of "universal free education for free citizens" (really forced socialization for government-dominated citizens) -- subsequent events are sure to prove that its officials are against making it really free and universal because this will threaten their jobs! Its main functional form was finalized during the era of East European immigration to the U.S., and to this day it seems more geared towards semi-Americanizing immigrants in large batches than towards educating free citizens. (The Soviet Union's Communist Party loves its public school system.) After decades of massive operations it has turned out generations of illiterate losers who would make the gutsy (home-educated) colonists who started this country puke. (This illustrates the age-old principle that a teacher can only influence you to become like himself, which nowadays would usually be a low-paid low-achieving loser working for a wasteful government!) Now its largest teacher's union -- which the author absolutely detests -- makes no secret of being devoted to increasing the federal government's control of education, along with its own! (It has often been charged with being anti-American, which it attempts to dispose of by complaining of a "conspiracy of the religious right": now let them try to explain the author away.) It is sad that so many private schools pattern themselves after the public schools, but that once again shows the clout the government has in this century of the mass man and highlights the need for comprehensive reform. If you wonder why the system doesn't become the subject of public outcry, the answer is that until the Knowledge Center plan there was nothing to put in its place (except home correspondence courses which don't seem to have caught on, and TV which will be discussed later). And any official education system will automatically take credit for the students' growth, as if it were the cause. (As living, growing beings, the students often have to fight the school to achieve growth, but that is not noticed.) Also, most parents were themselves mediocre students and thus they never realized how things were mismanaged. And of course there are always a few exceptional teachers in this system who are used to justify it, although they too were not caused by the system and would prosper better if they could work for themselves producing educational knowledge products for a larger market. (This is not to ignore the large amount of protest of the public schools, mainly for their quasi-constitutional socialization function.)4.2 The Classroom Teaching System
4.2.1 Its Teachers
After much study, the author believes that the classroom teacher is the problem. There is just no way an authority figure (usually obsessed with gaining respect) whose time is diluted over dozens of students is going to awaken intellectual curiosity, much less provide the intensive interaction required. (Instead, they stuff knowledge into their students with threats of punishment and hope they don't live long enough to see the end-products.)
Teachers should not be masters but servants. Nevertheless, they lord it over their students, making enemies of them day after day; and this leads many students to become enemies of learning. As, by and large, disciplinarians (from the necessity of managing a large number of "inmate" students if nothing else) they destroy the mental frame of mind needed for real learning even before they start. (Attempts to reform them have often led to the opposite extreme of complete laxity because of course the teacher is the problem and not the solution, or, in engineering lingo, is not much of a control variable.)
Of course, the public's lack of respect for them, suspicions of incompetence, and sneaking feeling that they are not all that necessary, or that the classroom system is wasteful (resulting in poor working conditions because the taxpayers refuse to pay more), creates widespread dissatisfaction inside this "profession", of whom a recent Gallup Survey revealed that only 45 percent want their children to pursue the same career!
Indeed, as the most effective use for a good live teacher is as a personal tutor (working for the student rather than the other way around), the public school system, which cannot afford so many (even if they exist), gives the student instead a near-caricature of a tutor, i.e., a schoolteacher (often teaching half a dozen subjects in the same semester).
As proof of the ineffectiveness of classroom teaching one might note that the better students often act as private tutors to their friends, usually having no trouble in outperforming the official, paid teachers; that individual tutors are often considered the only workable solution to teaching illiterate adults and poor achievers; and that taking a test often teaches the students more than hours of the teacher's bullshit. What a "profession" that sucks off the taxpayers and delivers little more than a babysitting and test giving service at an inflated price!
4.2.2 Classroom Socialization
As juvenile detention camps the classroom schools cannot help but socialize the students. Indeed, this is one of their biggest selling points to many people, and the true raison d'etre of many private schools.
While a little socialization (such as introducing American values and the American language) is hard to argue against, the trouble is that the thought of concentration of power over students in the classroom schools is an irresistible temptation to social engineers of all kinds (forced busing in the public schools and religious indoctrination in the private schools being too obvious to elaborate on), resulting in war after war using the students as cannon fodder, with the need for the students to be forced into classroom schools (and associated hierarchical social groups) in the first place seldom questioned. (Most states have laws -- and eager judges -- forcing students to attend either a public or private classroom school, or at least follow a "state-approved curriculum" despite a few students slipping through the cracks and often so distinguishing themselves as to cast doubt on the system.)
Like other social programs whose true dangers only became apparent after their "success", the public schools were begun in an era when the United States was much more homogeneous on a community by community basis, local control was unquestioned, private classroom schools were the norm, and the federal government was all-but impotent (the parents did not risk placing their children under the present-day weight of federal laws that now cover government buildings).
Hence, the public schools did not need to concern themselves with enforcing pandemic neutrality on social, political, and moral issues (some recent high school textbooks have even been accused of being neutral on the subject of the political systems of the U.S. and SU!), in achieving a categorical statistical balance of students and teachers, catering to the "rights" of various statistically-defined groups (regardless of individual rights), etc.; and the community control, while in principle just as abusive as all government control, in practice was kept in check by the very diversity and limited expanse of communities, if not their relative youth.
But now the decline in private schools, the advances in technology that are shrinking the world, the unionization of classroom teachers, and general overprocessing by the combined efforts of millions of selfish interests are forcing the schools toward an irresistible federalization and centralization of power and backfiring on those who used to be their biggest supporters. In short, two wrongs don't make a right and maybe enough people will now see how wrong the enforced socialization of public schools is to help abolish classroom schools of all kinds, public and private.
Another explosive issue is that, although parental surrogates, the classroom teachers find it impossible to teach moral values or controversial subjects, even with full permission of the legal parents, because as government schools anybody has the right to object. But a school that fails to confront knowledge in controversial areas is unworthy of the name! On the other hand, complete neutrality or issue avoidance by parental surrogates for the full school year is itself a statement easily leading to conclusions by students. There is no solution to this problem other than getting the government out of the surrogate parent business entirely, leaving children to home education and the inevitable tyranny of their legal parents (or freedom depending on your viewpoint): but never fear, with the flood of knowledge that will arrive with the coming Knowledge Centers, those parents who have tried to shelter their children from certain ideas are fighting a lost battle, and rightly so. Thus the biggest objection to home education is eliminated by the very technology that will permit it to be delivered in a cost-effective manner.
By the way, it is the author's opinion that most of the world's problems can be traced to group socialization which creates artificial races or herds out of populations and raises communication barriers and a group consciousness that is virtually impossible to eliminate. The very word race is loaded, connoting a foot race. How else can the existence of dozens of hundreds of Christian sects, or the habit of many people of talking about being born into a belief system be explained? What the world needs is more, not less communication, and individuals, not groups, addressing problems.
It might be mentioned that the current temptation to practice social engineering is so irresistible that even when the net result of the social engineering experiments is zero, the impression remains that all of the student's individual problems are meet subjects for school tinkering, and not the responsibility of the individuals involved (not to mention their parents). (A case in point: why are school dropouts always labelled "anti-social"?)
And of course this has created an opportunity for socialist state-worshippers to slip into the public schools unnoticed and indoctrinate students for a one-world socialist society. If a socialist teaching fraternity wants to socialize"the students they should at least be open and not try to conceal it under the rubric of "education" (which is so easy to do now) -- the Communist Manifesto itself (p. 88) makes no secret of promoting socialized over home education as a key part of its program.
To summarize, the author is absolutely against forced socialization for students, in public or private classroom schools. Instead, all education should be individualized and returned to the home, all government-enforced associations among children made completely illegal, and indeed the home made the target of universal knowledge delivery, the greatest hope for solving all "social" problems.
For those who still insist on certain types of socialization, such as enforcing American English as the national language, it must be pointed out that even one case of socialization opens the door for all others. And with the new Knowledge Centers, the vastly increased level of knowledge delivery will tend to reduce language barriers (in both directions) anyway.
4.2.3 Public Vs. Private Classroom Schools
A heated but phony issue in the country today is the split between the funding of public and private (esp. religious) classroom schools, usually manifesting itself in a battle over funding students on an individual basis (e.g., with tuition vouchers) versus funding them collectively and forcing them to attend the public schools. If it were not for the government's attempt to stand between the children and their parents with government teachers and government classrooms the split would be mended in a hurry; for there is no law that says the government must be in the teaching business anyway! On the contrary, taxpayers have a right to see their money spent efficiently, and there should be no bar to the government paying private companies for educational any more than for medical services. When the split is mended, the real issue, the need for any classroom schools, can be focused on.
This non-issue has been ridiculously confused by the claims that it involves the separation of church and state and is an attempt to funnel money into parochial schools. While the author agrees that church influence must be kept out of government classrooms, and that some big churches are in support of the cause, he does not agree that students must be forced into government classrooms! (And after all, no one is stopping anybody from setting up a secular or even secular humanist private school for those who want it.) The phoniness of the issue is evident when Medicare payments to individuals to permit them to use religious hospitals are considered.
Another claim often made is that the poor will be deserted by the affluent fleeing to the private schools, when with government paying for educational services on a student by student basis, the poor wouldn't have to attend the public schools either! But as the taxpayers will only authorize so much money for each student, and it is the middle class who will be paying most of the bill, the true solution for all is to cut the cost of education itself, which will be done only by reducing its labor-intensiveness, i.e., by eliminat- ing the classrooms and their teachers.
4.2.4 Teaching as a Profession
Thus the ineffective and divisive classroom teaching system is ripe for outright replacement. Naturally, the government's involvement in education has resulted in additional layers of bureaucracy and built-in inefficiencies that make real reform a monumental effort.
For example, the government's involvement in teaching has had the predictable effect of encouraging a privileged class of mediocre professionals who gang up to restrict competition and inflate the cost of their services. (It is common to hear them brag about the importance of their jobs.)
Actually, their professionalism always takes a back stage to their real function as a privileged class in an expansive hierarchical social system. (The hoopla surrounding the first teacher in space, complete with planned teaching lessons, is almost incomprehensible any other way.)
As a result it is not uncommon for one of these licensed pros who has only the most mediocre knowledge of a subject to win a new teaching job merely by applying for it and pretending to have an interest in the subject, while a real expert who is not licensed can't even apply! (For example, believe it or not, in some states no training in history is required of secondary school history teachers!)
And now even the most mediocre teachers make a big show out of establishing non-performance based credentials and licenses to prohibit anyone else from doing their "jobs": some even have the ridiculous idea that they are to be compared with real professionals like civil engineers and surgeons! Yet, in contrast to the other professions, the teachers unions often come out against even Micky Mouse proficiency tests because they fear they won't pass! If, of all groups, the teachers, who arrogate to themselves the right to test everybody else, won't themselves submit to tests, the system is obviously self-contradictory and justly held up to public ridicule and the contempt of the students.
Naturally, when teachers take these tests and fail they are quick to attempt to bypass them by claiming sacred cow status, usually as a member of a statistically-defined minority group. If this is a sufficient reason for licensing them, why doesn't the government dispense with medical and engineering school requirements also and just license a certain quota of minorities in those professions? And for that matter, dispense with all competency requirements and just award all available credentials based on quotas? (The author will pack up and move to another country soon after!) Clearly, some advocates of equal opportunity have fallen into the error of confusing opportunity with results. (Equal results automatically stifles equal opportunity, and this is the essential error of communist and socialist thinking.)
If a certain statistically-defined group (not as well-defined genetically as cows) is not doing as well as another, the solution is to improve the individuals who make up the group, not to lower the standards to make it appear that the gap is narrowing. In fact, maintaining the integrity of the standards is the only protection for those group members who do qualify, and who would otherwise be suspected of being tokens. In short, no professional credentials should be issued by any governmental body on any other criterion than pure, tested, performance.
The most humorous thing about this droll situation is that the teachers mimic the real professions by establishing their own education curriculum in college so that its graduates can hold a special credential that makes them into a semi-priest class that is otherwise difficult to gain membership in. Actually, nowadays most of the education majors are at the bottom of the class and don't begin to compare with their unlicensed classmates whom they shamelessly seek to shut out of the teaching profession, even on a part time basis, with this transparent ruse. (Strange that those with the best education aren't automatically considered education majors!)
The education curriculum is a standing joke and its study is a nearly worthless activity. (The author has spent more time than he likes to admit trying in vain to find something of value in the vast education section of the library.) And what can a person learn in an education course that he doesn't already know after spending more than a dozen straight years in a classroom? After the academic subjects to be taught are mastered, the future teacher ought to be nearly ready to go: to get any higher education degree (except, ironically, the education degree!) one must have automatically mastered all elementary and most secondary subjects anyway. And no one needs a license to teach college students, much less one's own children.
This scandalous situation must be reformed, perhaps by reducing the need for a license to those who teach minors in a classroom setting, the licensing process being reduced to a background check and some well-made proficiency tests (which will probably be flunked by most of the education majors and passed without effort by many others!)
It might also be mentioned that the school system's status system not only shuts out the really knowledgeable experts from teaching the students, and creates a "priesthood" who are considered all-educated (apologies to John Barth) and given authoritarian powers, but also fails to tap into perhaps the greatest undeveloped resource, namely, the gifted students (the author's definition: students who don't need teachers) who are forced to attend the class.
If the stupid licensing requirement were lifted, it might be possible to actually qualify the gifted students to help with (or even take over) the teaching, which would be the best thing for them to end their isolation from fellow students, and to encourage them to perfect their knowledge, simultaneously solving the teaching problem and the problem gifted students have with the schools! Since classroom teaching is currently dominated by so many mediocre talents, the really gifted can probably outperform most of them until they reach adulthood and switch careers; then younger ones can take their place. Left to their own devices, however, the teachers would -- and probably already have - spent millions of dollars on themselves studying how to teach them!
But there might not be time to institute such reforms now that the present plan has been developed. For even with the most proficient teachers in the world it must be repeated that the classroom teaching system itself is an ineffective, inefficient horse and buggy method of knowledge delivery and the real reform is to replace it with a better, less expensive, hi-tech system.
4.2.5 Lectures
The entire classroom system is based on delivering knowledge through lectures. The author could never understand the need for them. Ever since the invention of printing you would think the lecture, a medieval idea to literally read to one out loud, itself coming from the tradition of traveling bards, would have become obsolete, at least for students past the age of 5 or 6.
Now, with electronic knowledge delivery, which includes the ability to search through masses of information for that which is relevant at the time, and operate powerful knowledge tools, the linearly-presented, slow-moving, aural lecture, during which the classroom student has no access to knowledge technology but must sit naked and even take dictation (like a servant-class amanuensis!), seems like a real throwback to the Dark Ages. (At least, its usage should be limited to when one's hands are tied, such as when driving.)
And perverting the Socratic method of teaching the students by example to become seekers after knowledge who are not afraid to fail a lot, the sit-down lecturers instead demand that students become passive regurgitators of canned messages that always have to be "orrect (according to their interpretations) or suffer humiliating penalties, even expulsion from the student body.
Indeed, the example these teachers set is completely the opposite of Socrates because they don't still waste their own time listening to their colleagues' lectures, but search for knowledge in a completely different way! (If their victims are ever graduated into researchers they will have to competely relearn basic attitudes, which ironically perpetuates the system by making them feel superior all of a sudden to the low class students.)
Instead of lecturing to bored, embarrassed, infantile or insulted students, wasting their study time with low data rate, no-replay, single-pass oral broadcasts, and judging their progress by counting how many "raise their hands" during class and how many right answers they get on snapshot-type tests, the teacher should leave the students to work with intense computer-aided education (CAE) products and set himself up as an example through his ability to constantly scan the students' performances electronically and lead them out (the Latin root of "educate") of dead-end thought processes by gently redirecting the computer's questions -- but as this is real work the majority of today's teachers are sure to avoid it!
Surprisingly, however, the lecture system goes on virtually undisturbed, refusing to die, even for college level teaching.
For example, in the mid 1980s a non-profit institution was founded in Fort Collins to promote an electronic university, which, in their version, is a classroom lecture broadcast via satellite! (Ironically, the first subject taught was artificial intelligence.)
Another 1980s newspaper article actually seemed to claim that the epoch-making discovery of railroad crayons by a Univ. of Colorado Physics professor would make super teachers out of university professors with large (several hundred person) classes. The value of such large, impersonal classes where the students had obviously gone for decades not being able to read the board well was never questioned.
The article featured a picture of the professor with some of his work displayed on a blackboard. The idea of simply printing all of it beforehand on a word processor and distributing it to the students apparently never occurred to this genius; and if he was such a super professor why couldn't he package his knowledge in an electronic product and distribute it worldwide and become a millionaire? Sixty years after "modern physics" was inaugurated they still seem to be rewriting the basic introductory textbooks by the dozens, no doubt as make-work projects for state employees, for so most university employees are).
Even the more recent futuristic film 2010 revealed its weak grasp of the coming impact of technology by featuring a female (its main social message) college teacher who still taught primarily via oral lectures.
4.2.5.1 ...and the Teaching "Profession"
On the other hand, even the obvious move of making lectures more cost effective by setting up TV stations (or nowadays, reserving cable TV channels), one for each grade level, and broadcasting a mainstream lecture curriculum to students (on an elective basis, although it is obvious that only a tiny minority would want or need to go the classroom route) at home using the best available teacher for each course (who could be paid a really good fee for a change) -- a move which would permit a huge cost savings in teachers and school buildings in district after district -- is completely ignored because it would put so many of the professional parasites out of a job!
In short, the teaching so-called profession demands that the lecture must be delivered in person, to as small a class as possible, so that hundreds of people can be paid to do the job of one -- no wonder the teachers so naturally take to unions! And how dishonest of them to constantly rant against the boob tube on the basis of the commercial programming -- almost all entertainment fare because the education dollar has already been spent on the school system -- that it has broadcast, when the gigantic economic clout of the school system could have made TV the golden teaching device it has had in its potential from the beginning!
The reason that this insistence on oral lectures, even in electronic teaching products, goes virtually unquestioned by the victims, must surely be that from prehistorical (pre-writing) days man's most precious memories were transmitted orally and hence is virtually a genetic feature of our race. (There might also be an emotional aspect to being given a sermon by a pseudo priest figure.) Thus, virtually the whole educational hierarchy is based on a method of knowledge delivery that is so stupid and wasteful that those at the top are in a way the same kind of learned ignoramuses who used to dominate physics faculties in the time of Galileo. (The ultimate irony: the doctorate awarded for being a tractable ignoramus who cheerfully supports a government giveaway program.)
4.2.5.2 ...and Educational Research
Of course, virtually all so-called educational research, which starts with the premise of classroom-type teaching, is worthless because it doesn't even question the basic method of knowledge delivery.
A typical example was the announced breakthrough of educational research to the effect that students learn to write better through practice than by listening to a lecture. (This was reported on Denver's KCNC News on 10-2-85 --incidentally, the practice of reading the news over a broadcast channel but not publishing it in text form was just as stupid before the advent of the WWW.)
And of course the hierarchy, being dominated by de facto charlatans (complete with long strings of alphabet soup after their names), preside over a system that squanders money like water.
Another example was the failure of a local school system in the 1980s to purchase textbooks for their students until the last minute because of a so-called curriculum change, preferring to rely on the lecture method in the meantime (translation: they pay the teachers first, then buy textbooks with what is left over -- too bad it isn't the other way around). (And just why they should be designing a new curriculum for cut and dried elementary subjects is hard to fathom -- what new breakthroughs can there be at this late date other than some new parasite trying to keep their job?)
Another revealing 1980s example was the authorization of half a million dollars (to be spent on teachers' and administrators' salaries of course) to teach basic writing skills to 1700 Univ. of Colorado students (at almost $300 per student) in a classroom situation -- despite the obvious fact that the 12 or more years of previous classroom experiences didn't do the job for them in the first place. Like typical government employees they are rewarded for group incompetence. The picture of a government teacher standing in front of the class essentially reciting from a book while the students read along -- and the state paying half a million dollars for this, almost as much as the legislature's yearly appropriation to the Denver Public Library -- is worth more than a thousand words on this issue.
Even private universities have found a market for this stuff: the Univ. of Denver recently sent the author, an engineering professional, a brochure inviting him to attend their basic writing skills lecture course (for $495), where he could become an expert in only two days! (Maybe the Univ. of Colo. teachers ought to take this one so their students can have a short semester.)
In subjects transmitted through the printed word in the first place (particularly reading, writing, and arithmetic) this idiotic lecture system seems to be part of the problem rather than the solution. Is it the mannerisms, gestures, anecdotes, etc., that make a lecture indispensible, and if so how come the educators don't make a video tape encyclopedia of them to really advance education? Or admit that we all learn the material through self-study and that the lecture is a poor substitute for those who don't study and a waste of time for those who do. (Sadly, the overwhelming abundance of stuffed shirts among faculties has also contributed by forcing publishers to insist that published academic materials be dry and free of the kind of chat that lectures then have to provide at inflated expense.)
4.2.5.3 ...and Computer-Aided Education
In short, lectures are obsolete. They should be replaced as soon as possible with computer-aided education (CAE).
The biggest problem with the lecture, namely that it passivates the students and thus is virtually worthless for teaching any type of skill (especially reading), would be eliminated with CAE which actively involves them by requiring continual private responses. (Ironically the classroom teacher is so busy motivating the bored students that he never discovers that it is the method of knowledge delivery, not the subject matter, that is often the problem.)
The common objection to CAE from the professional teachers is that they are somehow more qualified than mere expertly-programmed teaching machines because they know what questions to ask: yet that job is the most easily automated. (They now can even automate the questions a physician asks in diagnosing an illness, which can be no easier.)
Another objection is that a computerized education might not be as thorough as one received from a live teacher; but the truth is nearly the opposite, as the computer is itself a very demanding student and must be programmed with exact knowledge which it never forgets!
And the requirement of public in-classroom responses to the teacher's questions can be very embarrassing, is done much too seldom to be effective, and in a social setting soon becomes a counterproductive game!
Finally, no teacher with a blackboard can match the knowledge displays that technology is making available, combining sound, graphics, video, and text. (The author remembers an enterprising business professor who used to give his lectures with the aid of dual slide projectors, with a clicker button in each hand, way back in the 1970s.)
4.2.5.4 ...and Experience
The teaching profession likes to brag about its experience, and use it as a reason to keep employing massive numbers of live teachers (with, of course, higher pay and tenure). A little analysis shows the phoniness of this issue.
First, it is no secret that there is a large turnover of teachers who leave the profession after only a few years, meaning of course that most of the teaching actually delivered to students is the work of beginners practicing on them!
And the experience is of course gained at the expense of the students, so that by the time the performance has been perfected the majority of a teacher's students might already have been passed! (Not to mention that no teacher can so perfectly memorize the performance as to repeat it exactly the same way for each group of students, although a computer can.)
Better to let this scenario be enacted on the minimum number of students by the minimum number of teachers, who then package their experience for the rest. In other words, the issue is not whether teachers should be experienced but rather why the hard-won experience of the best is not distributed to as many students as possible. (Ironically, the best teachers will then be well paid indeed, and not require tenure because they can live off their royalties.)
And then there are those who object that certain teachers have unique personalities or techniques; but that is a reason for more, not less, technology for distributing their products (the market will tolerate that kind of duplication). And with the present labor-intensive system, the teacher's personality often overrides the subject, so the students end up creating an enrollment war as they book the teachers who are known as entertainers or parental surrogates, or as easy marks, rather than as the most experienced and effective! (What an idiotic system when students take a professor rather than the subject: if lectures were abolished, the entire body of professors could contribute to each student!)
4.2.5.5 ...and What is Stalling Reform
Obviously what we have here is a large industry facing obsolescence and naturally resisting progress. Clearly, these classroom lecturers will continue in their unnecessary jobs as long as there is a market for this multi-billion dollar boondoggle which squanders the nation's economic potential, becoming as bad as the problem which it is supposedly trying to solve (although there is some merit in giving what amount to handouts to the highly learned to keep them in the stable -- which is another issue).
Unfortunately, now that the government subsidizes education, there is a well-paid lobby antagonistic to real reform because it would affect their incomes, which are always "too low", despite the fact that raising their salaries without reforming the classroom system would be a colossal waste of the nations' resources, and might strengthen the lobby so much that reform is impossible!
As a footnote, the author, who has heard every argument advanced by the teacher's unions as to why their featherbedded members should be given higher salaries, tenure, and so on (despite the fact that they will soon serve no useful purpose), never expects to see the creativity of the teachers (in service of self) end, the best one he has heard lately being that older college faculty should be kept on despite the fact that they might be outdated and non-productive and be keeping brighter, younger people down (in college, remember, the professors double as lecturers and researchers), because they add to the "coherence of the curriculum"!
4.2.5.6 ...and the Illiteracy Problem
Since the only way to learn how to read is through practice, no wonder that the products of the K-12 classroom system -- which wastes almost all the available practice time with transportation, roll call, social and disciplinary functions, and attention getting -- are suffering from near illiteracy. (Some claim that there were as many as 80 million functionally-illiterate adults in the U.S., and 400,000 in Colorado, during the 1980s and 1990s, after all those billions have been spent on public schools.)
Yet once the teachers are seen as the problems the solution is so ridiculously simple that Pac Man could lead one to it: the hi-tech industry merely has to be encouraged to produce educational knowledge products based on a video game approach that use voice synthesizers to talk the students into understanding the rudiments of reading (using a rich selection of entertaining reading material, slanted to the student's stated preferences), and then increasing the amount of purely textual material offered, providing on-line services such as a pronouncing dictionary, thesaurus, geographical dictionary, syntax analyzer, etc.
Then maybe the millions of functionally-illiterate adults, the expensive failures of the classroom system, can cheaply work themselves out of their problems at home, not only learning how to read and write, but how to type and use computers! (Strange that computers have revolutionized the arcade long before the classroom; you can blame government employees for that, not only because they have stifled private enterprise in the classroom but because they are always in a hurry to ban games on the computers they do have!)
As an aside, voice synthesizer technology is sure to spawn a reading automation industry which produces "computer lecturers" that can read any kind of material out loud, not only for illiterates, but for those with dyslexia, blindness, and other reading limitations, and for those who wish to use dead time to improve their minds (such as those driving automobiles). This is the true destiny of the lecture, after it has been removed from mainstream education.
And maybe another idiotic excess of the educational establishment, namely, that of preaching reading of books as somehow superior to watching electronic knowledge delivery (TV) -- despite the self-contradictory insistence on oral classroom lectures -- can be ended, and electronic knowledge products made the main form of universal knowledge delivery. (But hopefully these products won't simply consist of video-taped lectures!)
4.3 Other Objections
The author once read a book which contained the following objections to compulsory classroom schools:
1. Multi-function (not just education but babysitting, discipline, sports and recreation, age-sorted social interaction, etc., doing none of them well). (They even use the forced school attendance as a way to insure each child has a government birth certificate and immunization shots!)
2. Authoritarian rule (often weeding out the really gifted and creative as troublemakers; creation of peer pressure to be a conformist to get the good grades; spanking and other degrading physical punishment to make the student learn something, despite the danger of turning him off for life to learning; etc.)
3. Graded curriculum (snapshot grading with belittling of retries; confusion of those who get good grades with those who can really create new ideas out of the material.)
4. Pacing and the grade system (makes soldiers instead of scholars and insures that those who didn't grasp a single grade's material will never learn anything else as they are ruthlessly advanced; slows the whole class down to the lowest common denominator, which is one of the reasons a European or Japanese high school diploma is often equivalent to our 4-year college degree).
5. Assumes teacher causes learning (when the student causes learning).
6. Hidden curriculum.
To this the author would add:
7. Forced attendance, which is un-American and concentrates arbitrary power in the hands of non-neutral administrators. (Some schools even use attendance as a big part of the class grade, regardless of test results!)
For example (a couple that were reported sometime during the 1980s or 1990s, the author has lost the references):
o A couple of Denver public school students were suspended because the over-powerful administrators didn't like the mother's attitude! (Though if the mother had tried to withdraw the students herself her attitude wouldn't matter to the administrators who would seek to have her arrested and her children forced to attend!) The thin justification of being for the student's own good is easily penetrated by the case of students who have mastered the material for the rest of the semester, but must still attend.
o A teenager with terminal muscular dystrophy was threatened with being placed in a foster home because he refused to attend school (the old argument that classroom education's main justification is its long-term investment in the child being completely forgotten)! Now it seems that a big issue is attendance for students who have AIDS, when the real question ought to be (as for all terminally-ill) why they would wish to attend school at all.
8. Attendance required for graduation, which creates the bizarre phenomenon of dropouts (from choice, because of pregnancy, need to work, behavior problems, etc.) who consider their education over with because of lack of attendance. (With Knowledge Center education the student proceeds at his own pace and has a lifetime learning connection that may be pursued at home, work, or anywhere else that the Knowledge Center can be accessed.)
9. Required course of study, which does not recognize alternate paths to same goal; inner trials and questioning; attempts to jump over, get an overview, and justify the need for, certain subjects; and which stifles real curiosity by forcing near-perfect imitation rather than a series of failed but enlightening creation attempts. (Often the geniuses are those who bypass the required sequence and study taboo material!)
10. Appearance of finality, so that the student feels he has learned it all just because the course is completed with a high grade (or never will, because he got a low grade).
11. The abnormal cycle of the semester which justifies idleness followed by intensive cramming, and fragments the educational process into phony fragmented courses in an arbitrary sequence. (A poignant example the author remembers is basic calculus, which is split into two entirely different courses, the practical (called basic) and the theoretical (called advanced): supposedly to be taken in a progression, the author found they are best studied in parallel!) Really, education should be a lifelong, seamless process, and all educational experiences should be saved for a lifetime for constant review.
12. Group approaches to individual problems (catering to the norm, neglecting the abnormal; or vice versa.)
13. Passivation of students who come to rely on their schoolmaster for motivation. (Often, the teachers talk about various schools of thought when they mean opinions of other teachers, the students not being recognizing as having any!)
14. Emphasis on learn-and-forget rather than cumulative mastery, much less creativity.
15. Frequent need to study the teacher more than the subject (to psych him out; become his pet, perhaps by erasing the blackboards or bringing in an apple; master his version of the subject to the exclusion or others).
16. Passing students on an assembly line basis from teacher to teacher (which is no substitute for continuous, individual attention to a student's needs and desires, is it?)
17. Little focus on the library (Knowledge Center) as a lifelong learning environment. (Indeed, many teachers are library slobs".) Or, pressure by parents to remove books from school libraries, which is perhaps poetic justice for getting government too far into education.
18. No insurance against teacher malpractice. You are forced to tolerate a teacher you dislike (which happens quite often, as many teachers are only teaching because they are at the bottom of the job market and can't get something better). Your grade is supposed to be reflective of you rather than the teacher. The teacher often covers up incompetence with arrogance. If you miss a class period you are treated like a criminal. If you fail to take notes during history class the teacher will often refuse to give you the missing information, as if their purpose were to play games with knowledge rather than lead to it. If you snicker at the teacher's sketches, or worse, know more than him, you may be severely humiliated to restore the teacher's pride. If you attempt to debate a teacher, you always lose as he literally stands in the way of your economic future: hence free speech and discussion are stifled.
19. Emphasis on immediately-measurable incremental achievement (the fallacy of the blind men and the elephant, measuring a multi-dimensional phenomenon with a single number, or killing an organism to study its life processes), often degraded to memorization and regurgitation of facts, to justify the teacher, rather than on a long-term approach of subtle programming of the unconscious with knowledge that is often purposefully "forgotten" to keep the consciousness hungry for more, to gradually raise the level of understanding. (The classroom teachers really can't stand the thought of merely leading students to each of the knowledge items in the course and letting them master them at their own rate and in their own order; every item must be mastered when first encountered, slowing the class down till the frantic catch-up effort at the end of the semester.)
This is most obvious in the teaching of foreign languages, where they make the students "master" little bits of the grammar at a time and severely penalize them for failing to regurgitate on command, while even the A students can study this way for years and fail to become fluent! They would be better off letting the students listen to the teacher talk (to himself or to friends on the phone), or watch foreign language television, to gradually make sense of the language the way all of us have done anyway with our inborn "language acquisition device", the concept of "grades" being worthless here. (The author as an adolescent once took a Spanish course at a public school where the authoritarian teacher, who was a pure Castilian and apparently looked down on Mexicans, made a point of conducting hours of Castilian pronunciation drills; the author couldn't resist mispronouncing "helado" (where the "h" is supposed to be silent) to unveil the teacher's true feelings: he was almost kicked out of the class!)
20. Brainwashing. All classroom schools delight in this activity, the debates among the parents often being limited to the subject of the kinds of brainwashing that are permissible!
21. Creeping Curriculum. Like any kind of pseudo life form, the "curriculum" expands to saturate the available resources. This had led to the public school teachers' mentality of seeking government funding for every type of fad under the guise of "curriculum" (e.g., "environmental studies", "nuclear war studies"). Allied with this is the tendency to centralize government control of education so that begging for funds (and socialization of teachers) becomes easier. The author questions what these "studies" are doing in the "curriculum", and indeed what a "curriculum" is any more? (After the "3R's", the government's interest in curriculum should be ended, as intelligent people with a grasp of fundamentals can learn anything they want without their hot breath on their backs.)
4.4 How to Reform Them
4.4.1 Teachers
The teaching profession (I resist using quote marks every time I use that word) needs to take a long look at itself and admit that most of its members are non-contributors and can be automated out of existence, just as musicians have their services automated by recordings that are mass-produced to give the customer the best in the world rather than a grab-bag of mediocre local (state employee) talent. (As proof of the market for educational knowledge products there is Denver's new "Homework Hotline", which was swamped with calls from students who obviously weren't getting the help they needed from their own teachers!)
Since the true solution is (and has always been) for each student to have his own tutor (all other personnel in the educational process such as administrators being pure overhead), the advent of cost-effective computerized tutors will make the public school system work for the first time ever. Since this technology is bound to put the classroom teachers out of business sooner or later, why not sooner? (Instead they seek to keep their jobs by demanding smaller classes and higher salaries, which will improve teaching but is 50 years too late to be considered!)
There is something enormously phony about a group of professionals who are supposed to be preparing children for the technological, individualistic society of the future but who themselves refuse to adopt technology because it might reduce the number of them on the massive socialized government payroll!
And the scandal of a nation of school teachers who are dumber than their students would be ended painlessly if the few good teachers would quit wasting their time teaching a few dozen at a time and go back to the workshop and produce electronic educational knowledge products which package their knowledge and experience for large numbers of students (including the mediocre teachers!), who would each be made to feel as if they were getting personal service; likewise, real experts in various subjects can package their knowledge and sell it for student use without first having to get the worthless "license".
With this simple step of electronicizing the curriculum (with privately-produced knowledge products) the publicly-funded education system would begin to work for the first time, not only in terms of costs and benefits but in terms of getting those who know to serve those who don't. And the concomitant elimination of the obsolete grading systems, substituting better tests for evaluating real progress and rewarding it immediately, along with a lifetime learning approach for all, will individualize education far better than passing students from classroom teacher to classroom teacher for a dozen years and then closing the doors in their faces.
A real danger to be avoided is incrementally reforming the teaching profession by letting them form committees to evaluate the Knowledge Center approach and then reform themselves piecemeal. (Most of them currently are almost computer-illiterate and unless they go back to their own schools they cannot be considered as necessary consultants at all -- in many cases it would be better to consult their students!) As government employees, there is no chance that they will seek to eliminate their own jobs, and hence the system they finally come up with will inevitably be laced with needless jobs for themselves (and their administrators!).
Nor do they need to stay on to evaluate educational knowledge products from the curriculum viewpoint, as the so-called curriculum will itself be abolished! (The basic skills that everyone needs to learn are actually the easiest to evaluate.)
And it makes little sense to attempt to reform education without reforming the entire public knowledge delivery system in one lump, unless the U.S. enjoys being headed for a second class economic future.
Another aspect of state supported education and research that is often overlooked is that as "competitors" (dipping their snouts in the same trough), those who produce new knowledge rarely are concerned with retracing their steps for others, indeed, they often disguise them. (One is reminded of the paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel which are the net result of a lot of work which has left no trace.) Hence, one half of the state-supported knowledge industry (teachers) is currently trying to reconstruct the path of knowledge discovery that is so cleverly disguised by the other half (researchers); often the teachers are former researchers who couldn't make the grade!
This system must have survived so well because it makes work (the main incentive for a government employee) for each group; but with the emerging knowledge economy and the decline of the state education employee it would be just plain stupid for a researcher to miss out on the chance to package his method of discovery and sell it, provided the state doesn't try to latch onto his royalties. (The author admits this also happens in the private sector, but not to such an extent, as they have to sell something to stay in business.) Hence, the time lag between knowledge discovery and reformulation for teaching purposes is bound to shrink, another boon to education in general.
4.4.2 Schools
Because the author believes that making complete knowledge available to all citizens is a lifetime process, best done on a self-paced basis initiated by the student rather than forced, and that forced social engineering programs are wasteful and stupid as well as anti-American, he wishes to see the present school system completely reformed to bring back home education via the proposed Knowledge Centers: each student can still be required to meet certain educational goals (basic skills) through spending a certain amount of effort at home (perhaps monitored by the government to satisfy the bureaucratic element) on educational knowledge products that are achievement rather than conformity- oriented, which concentrate on the "three R's", and are devoid of any social engineering content; then the student can qualify himself at year-round proctored tests at the few remaining school buildings (or better, at the new Knowledge Centers).
As to the school buildings, their only other function would be as social-recreation centers, where it is likely that the students would by and large volunteer to attend one or two days a week no matter how much education they are getting at home: but this will cut the number of facilities and personnel by 60 to 80 per cent, and force the social engineers to come out of their camouflage, which is a start. And the availability of Knowledge Center education will permit the so-called teachers of the younger students to concentrate on babysitting outright. (Maybe the remaining schools can then be opened 24 hours a day, year-round, to really serve the public.)
To make it plain that public schools will not be needed (except perhaps for the babysitting function -- but then that can also be better done by private companies), the author can mention the intermediate step of "electronic classrooms" where each student is given his own computer terminal stocked with educational knowledge products, and a teacher roams the room assisting the students.
This system, while superior to the old fashioned classroom (where passing periods, taking attendance and socializing takes much of the time, and feedback from the teacher is diluted by the number of other students), is still a ridiculous waste for students who have to be transported back and forth, and could talk to the teacher electronically just as well at home (when the market becomes large enough for the technology to be adapted). And as the educational knowledge products themselves improve, less and less of the live teacher will be required, except for the very young students, very poor achievers, or "problem" students, who are well provided for now anyway.
As to the very young students, the electronic delivery of education holds much promise for intensive infant education, giving students a head start and maybe producing some "super babies" with high IQ's. Then government-style "Head Start" programs can be laid back in the toy box.
Then the idiotic German system of kindergarten plus twelve grades, and a 4-year college curriculum with credits can be abolished and students can concentrate on mastery of a menu of specific skills and subjects, at their own pace, with some students beginning college level studies while others are still mastering reading and writing: but there is never a graduation because learning will be a lifetime process. (Instead there will be qualifying exams for certifications for those who want them.)
And instead of spending four thousand dollars per student for a year of K-12 education, the state can spend a fraction of that on babysitting and social/recreation activities, 50 to 100 dollars a month for a personal computer (for those who don't have their own) plus five hundred dollars on educational knowledge products and Knowledge Center fees to achieve the same effect! (The entire knowledge stock involved in a K-12 education is certainly trifling compared to the inventory of the Knowledge Centers, and, because of the huge sales volume, will be quite inexpensive if not practically free after awhile.)
In case it is objected that some serious older students have parents that will not exactly encourage their studies, the author recommends the state pay for their transportation (with RTD passes, not forced rides on aging school buses) to the Knowledge Center where they can work in peace (rather than to a public school and its age-sorted babysitting atmosphere); or, certain of the school buildings can be remodelled as mini Knowledge Centers, open to the general public, which students can visit on subsidized transportation, but where there are no regimented classes and authoritarian teachers.
4.5 Universities
The university movement, a creation of the Middle Ages, originally spread (like syphilis) from Italy to France, England, and Germany. As an offshoot of the Church it early acquired its bizarre, hierarchical (church) organization (church robes still being worn by the officials during formal occasions), its guild-like system of "degrees" (as if there is one absolute knowledge whose attainment can be measured on a one-dimensional scale like a thermometer's), and its attitude of being a "sanctuary" that is isolated from the surrounding community.
None of these characteristics (except the last, which in modern America is largely obsolete) encourages academic freedom, and it is no surprise that few universities are now homes of academic freedom. Nevertheless, the United States "bought the farm" in the last couple of centuries and has created a gigantic system of public universities (there are now 147 public research universities) that still embody many of the medieval relics. (One of the only good ideas that the original universities had that is now missing is the domination of teachers by the students who paid their salaries!) In recent decades the system has become an omnibus social system of its own, going beyond all original pretexts. (The annual budget for the University of Colorado is almost $900 million!) It is time to rope this system in and divest it of all but its knowledge gathering and educational functions.
4.5.1 Ph.D Degrees
One medieval relic that should be shucked once for all is the Ph.D. This German idea to socially raise a learned person in a class society to the level of an aristocrat, and which was perfected in an age of slowly-moving fields of knowledge which had to be transmitted from generation to generation intact, is blindly carried along even in fields of knowledge which change so rapidly that a dissertation is obsolete in a few years (e.g., hi-tech engineering or computer science), or are so bogus or hazily defined as to border on the absurd ("business", "education", "social science", "human communication", "political science", "psychology", even "parapsychology").
Nevertheless it survives because of the government mentality of brow-beating people with titles. As a result, the title of Doctor has lost its integrity and is rapidly developing negative connotations -- as well it should, for the Middle Ages with its ugly social systems, especially the feudalism and all-encompassing church hierarchy, have mainly disappeared, so why do we need to keep perpetuating these inane status certificates? (Of course many now view the Ph.D. as a credential which proves an ability to set and achieve a difficult goal, which would not be so bad if the goal itself were more worthwhile.)
As for the Germans, you would think that after kicking their asses in two world wars we wouldn't allow ourselves to keep suffering from their stuffed shirt status system of disciplinarian professors, but somehow these Teutonic invaders have kept and even fortified their positions in the universities. (They send coded identification signals to each other in academic journals, the most frequent one being the short biography which begins with the words "the author received his Ph.D. from ... in ...".)
To show the deterioration of academic freedom perpetuated by the Ph.D., one need only note that its minting creates an instant authority whose word is seldom questioned, stifling real debate with his future "students" or the general public. To partially redeem this deficiency, the original Ph.D. was supposed to be earned in a learned debate with the other Ph.D. holders, as well as the general public, taking part; this practice, which survives more or less ritualized in Europe, is almost completely forgotten in America, where the disserations are often accepted without question by the university after being recommended by a few faculty members. (The author once saw a recent dissertation in Computer Science at the Univ. of Colorado which was based on work which any high school student could have done, namely, counting how many of each type of language construct were present in a grab bag of computer programs! This Doctor, who is probably now earning a high salary somewhere, should have had a special commendation from the Brobdignag Academy attached to his certificate!) Thus, the pernicious quality of such academic "credentials" is left unchecked.
Of course the old practice of taking away a doctorate once the dissertation was disproved in debate has likewise disappeared, although the guilty feelings of most universities survive in the near-secrecy with which they treat their published disserations, closely restricting access to them and preventing many copies from being made! (At the Univ. of Colorado library, the shelves full of dissertations are virtually uncataloged and difficult to use, one of the most worthless areas of the library.) One wonders why dissertations are not automatically distributed worldwide for debate prior to acceptance, and why there is no computerized system for distributing them to a world hungry for knowledge if they really contain so much value. The answer obviously is that they are of value, not to the public, but to the institutions that mint them, to add to their alleged prestige, perpetuating a credential inflation that ironically lowers their perceived value by the public. (The author admits that there is an occasional gold nugget in this mass of slag, but then, so what?)
Finally, the worthlessness of the degree as a real mark of quality is proved by many who literally buy "fake" degrees and then practice without fear of discovery on the basis of performance. While many will consider these degrees as not only fake but somehow criminal, the author welcomes them as yet more proof that the official universities are often little more than degree factories themselves and need to be reformed if not eliminated first!
4.5.2 The Guild System
The universities have always been real pyramid schemes with students made to work for free for their professors for a long period until they have "paid their dues" and get "guild licenses" (degrees) that permit them to "be graduated" and move up the pyramid (they call it a "ladder") a step, which procedure is instrumental in creating a "class structure" (pun intended) leading to excesses and attempted solutions such as (class-conscious) fraternities. Of course, their "degrees" are now "recognized" not only by the state but by many employers as if they were arms of the university; and the fact that the graduate only had a mediocre knowledge of his "subject" at the time the degree was "granted" doesn't stop the university from claiming credit for all his accomplishments for the rest of his life (even though he would have accomplished just as much without their "help"), while deprecating those who are self-taught.
As most products of this system begin to realize (after it is too late), they would probably have succeeded anyway by merely being exposed to the knowledge in a good library (much less Knowledge Center)! (The oft-quoted observation that a public library is a poor man's university ironically contains the seeds of the solution to the university problem!) In effect, the universities try to preselect the ones who are going to succeed without their help, and then "get in the middle", usually by regimenting their studies in a degrading "lock step" system, and then "graduate" them and throw all their weight into giving them unfair economic advantages over non-graduates, to "justify" their entire system (and its billions of dollars of yearly waste)!
Of course, like the pyramid it is, the system tends to reward its members for longevity rather than achievement, much less current performance, so that many faculties are plagued with such a large amount of "dead weight" in the form of "tenured" professors that it virtually turns away young blood. One recent newspaper article indicated that 38 percent of college professors are considering leaving the field, because "they feel locked in and filled with doubt about their capacity to ascend the academic ladder". (Only a third of them said that tenure should be abolished to improve higher education!)
One terrible excess of the university's guild system is that all the professors could be dead wrong about a major issue and the poor student may actually be expelled for challenging them. In other words, the emphasis is on socializing the student to fit into the degreed pecking order rather than in encouraging individual creative achievement. (For example, they refused to give Mendel his doctorate because he didn't agree with the authorities; medical faculties long considered anybody who considered nutrition as a factor in cancer to be a quack; and recently, the rapid advance of Computer Science has actually made
5.0 The Coming Knowledge Economy
Believe it or not, the author was nearly done with the first ed. of this report when he first heard (on 12-10-85) of Alvin Toffler's Third Wave! (He was another victim of Colorado's poor knowledge distribution system -- or a beneficiary of its relatively good system at the time?)
This section, mostly written previously, attempts to sketch the coming knowledge economy in light of the author's Knowledge Center plan and should be contrasted with that book.
5.1 The Great Migration
Great migrations change history. Right now the most significant migration is in what grown people are working at for a living.
Until recently most of our nation's economy was based on physical labor (Toffler's "First Wave"). (It is hard to believe that only 60 years ago 90 per cent of farm hands had no electricity.)
Since labor is more efficient when organized into disciplined groups operating costly machines, the phenomenon of the capitalist who owned the machines and hired employees (formerly "servants") to operate them emerged (Toffler's "Second Wave").
Of course this concentration of power over people perpetuated a form of class society which caused a few capitalists to begin treating the workers as less than human, so the practice of organizing the workers together into power centers (unions) became common. (When they got the upper hand they abused their power just as much, and many are now naturally controlled by mobsters.)
Now, the electronics industry has begun to make machines smart so that no humans are required at all (Toffler's "Third Wave"). The stupid unions, now thinking that being a laborer for life is a right (usually after claiming that since they "built" the country they are "entitled" to it -- after the horses and mules), are now protesting this wonderful step forward for the human race, who will soon be freed of the need for all manual labor. Maybe the capitalists ought to pay off the union laborers by giving them some stock in their obsolete companies or selling them the companies completely, walking away with the cash and making a joke out of the labor/management distinction. In any event, most workers will find themselves forced to use their minds to make money, just as the so-called managers do, so that the union will no longer have a reason to exist.
Of course, the computerization of the office will make many corporate-type jobs obsolete also and result in a great streamlining of business. (For instance, many people have experienced the sudden increase in productivity when a word processor is first used.) This reduction in the cost of business will eventually be passed on to the consumers, lowering the cost of living for all and freeing office workers for more creative work.
At the same time the robotization of the production economy is sure not only to lessen the scarcity of all physical goods, but permit unprecedented customizing through user-specified programming of the robots (for example, custom designed houses, clothes, cars, etc.) that will turn even these hard goods into "knowledge products".
5.2 The Meaning of "Economy"
A common source of confusion is the meaning of the word economy. The essence of an economy is a system for distributing scarce goods. (Thus air and sunshine are not normally parts of the economy, although they can be.)
The advent of computerized machines is sure to make many physical goods less scarce, hence, less a part of the economy: no wonder that fewer will make their livings in the production industry. (The last gasp attempts of the old-style production industry to get import restrictions imposed are in effect attempts to make their goods more scarce to increase their value in the economy.) On the other hand, those same people will find these goods becoming cheaper and more plentiful, so they don't have to work as hard to purchase them anyway. Maybe one day all basic necessities (for a present-day middle-class lifestyle) will be nearly free and one won't even have to become a part of the economy to enjoy them!
The future economy will be more and more based on knowledge products and services because it is these that will be most scarce and in demand in the economy. (The end of the knowledge economy will come only when knowledge becomes so abundant that all can receive unlimited amounts without working!)
Thus, the future knowledge economy will consist of people who literally buy and sell knowledge for a living; they will treat hard goods as products to be produced by robots to the specifications of yet more knowledge businessmen.
Another group will be selling skills for a living, for example, designers, technicians, lawyers, surgeons. After all, the human body is still the supreme skill machine and is likely to remain so for a long time.
Finally, those who have no education or skill will not be trapped in service jobs that are low paid, low status and often changing: the robots will take those jobs over (in fifty years or so)! On the contrary, while it might be a little shocking now, such people will tend to be counted as children rather than adults and accordingly provided for! (We already see the beginnings of this process in the indestructible "welfare state" which came to being even before the robot, and in fact gave the robot its name!)
And this is not so bad! The sudden maturity which comes on a person once he is forced to earn his living is bought at the loss of a certain plastic quality of the mind and an associated loss of raw potential (this must be why humans have the longest childhood and adolescence of any species); and what's wrong with extending childhood for those who don't want or need to become part of the economy? The busy robots will one day produce so much that even those who are at the bottom end of the "economic scale" will have the consolation that the good things in life are available in unprecedented quantity at ever decreasing cost (given that the knowledge economy solves the large scale social problems of huge populations).
Thus the knowledge economy of the next centuries will flourish in an environment of automated robot machines that will make us all materially rich without physical labor, freeing more minds than ever to solve man's problems while the rest play as little children. (The author will refrain from the standard biblical quotations here.)
5.3 Employment Relationships
5.3.1 Employer/Employee Relationships
The author's dream is the end of the domination of the old employer/employee relationship. This monstrous socio-legal corpus, which has developed for centuries, has such a large amount of legal and social paraphernalia built around it that it is practically unusable for the knowledge era.
It survives on the phony assumption that being an employee gives one security, when it ought to be known by now that one's only security is one's ability to perform. Even at its best, the security is merely the right to work at the same job till one drops (or is forced out as too old) and gets a reduced salary in the form of a pension (if one lasts that long: often those close to retirement are given the dirtiest jobs, or are asked to retire early because of some sudden crisis). The pension, which is often accompanied by a loss of self worth as one is turned out to pasture, is either paid for by previously lowered wages or by creating a pyramid scheme paid for by younger workers. (Luckily the government recently authorized IRA's).
The worst flaw in the idea is the assumption that a person must work at a certain output level for an entire lifetime (like a fixed machine), keeping regular hours at the employer's plant, and being paid at a constant hourly rate regardless of achievement (which obviously takes the incentive away to be creative or, turned topsy-turvy by many hi-tech industries where creativity is constantly demanded, leads to increased stress levels and career burnout).
This system is a danger to the whole world economy as it goes against the individual productivity and creativity that makes any country great: a better system would let a person, at his option, work like a madman and "burn the midnight oil" for some years (on his own schedule) until he achieved a real increase in the wealth of his company and, being fairly rewarded for it, permitted to retire for a few or several years at his own discretion.
An inevitable companion of this system is the old pyramid scheme where each person gets a title and status, which justify some people getting paid for the work of others that they are supervising. Allied with this is the fiction of a career where each person is supposed to be ambitious and fired up and then rewarded by getting continual pay increases but usually finds that they stop at a certain point and are replaced with status rewards instead (obviously they don't want you to get rich or you'd quit!): finally, when the top is reached, one usually finds that the company is really closely held by a family that can fire them in ten minutes (as in the Depression Era play The Death of a Salesman)! (It is sad to see the younger workers, particularly the women, entering this system without questioning its existence.)
The prevalence of this system has created many ridiculous distortions in the economy, for example, a "professional license" (license to print money), "union grievance" (for moving a waste paper basket across the room when it wasn't your "job"), and so on, all of which hurt real economic progress. Truly it was said that no one can become successful financially unless he works for himself; but never forget that this applies to the society as a whole too.
5.3.2 Government Working Relationships
The phenomenon of the growth of big government with millions of bureaucratic employees (over 16 million in the U.S. as of Oct. 1984 according to the U.S. Census Bureau) is another sad result of the "employee system". Few probably realize that the main difference between the U.S. and the old U.S.S.R. is the SR, i.e., the socialization ratio or percentage working for the government. (To the author, socialism boils down to making everyone an employee of the same employer, the government, with no one being allowed to own a company or work for themselves or ultimately even decide what direction their life work should take; this is why employees of large companies develop such indifference that they might as well be working for the government, any government.)
Since the essence of the civil service system is selfless service, an impossible fantasy (as was proved by actual trial by the Pilgrims, although the lesson never sunk in, the "Thanksgiving" holiday having been taken over by the churches), the way to reform it is not by providing "merit pay", as has often been proposed. (While private companies have to key salaries to the market, at least roughly, a government organization is insulated from market forces; the net result would be the bureaucrats evaluating themselves and naturally paying themselves the "market rate", whether they deserve it or not).
Rather, it should be reformed indirectly by dismantling it and providing the same (or far less) services through private companies in a competitive market, retaining the minimum number of bureaucrats necessary to manage, but not perform or even award, the contracts.
This is because when the government begins to award large numbers of contracts, as in the Defense Industry, the inevitable result is that the lazy government bureaucrats seek to minimize their work by cultivating a stable of qualified bidders who are treated like sacred cows and kept in business no matter how mismanaged they become (this is often openly admitted but justified as "maintaining the defense posture of the country" which is of course, pure garbage as the same people who are working in the mismanaged companies are still going to be around to reorganize into better onces if the companies are only allowed to go out of business).
The net result is that the really qualified people are kept down, having no recourse but to work as employees for the "qualified bidder" middlemen. (Large defense contractors often have talented people working alone or in a small group doing all the work on a contract while the company marks their services up by a factor of three or more and keeps the difference to pay for the squadrons of "managers" and dead weight employees; if the same people would try to form their own company, the obstacles would become insurmountable of course.)
The resulting near-socialization of the contractors is that laws are passed to limit the profits the supposedly cutthroat contractors can make on them. Unfortunately, the laws are meaningless because without real market competition the true price of a contract cannot be established; thus, the usual result is to limit the percentage profit on a contract, not the absolute amount, which soon backfires as the contractors pad the contracts with dead weight employees or make-work assignments to raise the overhead and thus the amount of profit. (Once the author, working for a large defense contractor as an engineer, saw an accounting sheet to be sent to the government, which had as many as a dozen people whom he had never heard of charging to the contract even though the author was doing the whole job by himself -- he resigned soon after!)
Thus, if the government employees were reformed to automate their offices enough to permit any group of people to band together (electronically) and bid to perform services competitively (given that they have sufficient capital, which for knowledge services in a Knowledge Center economy will be trivial), the big contractors would soon be forced to reform themselves or go out of business as their own employees quit and compete against them (to the taxpayer's benefit). This is the real method by which the defense budget can be slashed by half or more without really affecting the defense posture of the country (if the politicians are courageous enough to do it.)
5.3.3 Knowledge Company Working Relationships
The author therefore believes that most knowledge workers should be self-employed to by-pass the employment laws. The concept of having one's own business and being permanently unemployed is really the American Way!
When millions of people begin to think of themselves as self-employed businessmen, husbandmen and patriarchs of future generations rather than lifetime "employees" on a subsistence income and a career conveyor belt, the main economic problems of this country will solve themselves in a single generation. If, even as a child, a person knows that everything he does will affect his company's business future, then study, work, social attitudes, and a surprising number of other things, will self-regulate without the intervention of government social programs!
Note that the author is not completely against the employer/employee system. If there are those who still need or want to be employees they are free to work that way, especially if they use their jobs to get valuable experience prior to working for themselves, a frequent necessity considering the poor education they get at the classroom schools and universities. (This is the basis of the author's suggestion that professional training should be largely subsidized by employers from the beginning.)
By the way, if one is curious how to start a knowledge business, the answer is to keep an eye out for people complaining about something and then go and solve it, packaging the solution as a product or service, and "manufacturing" it on a personal computer. (You are looking at one such product!) Then through dealing with existing distributors, or by winning a contract, one can sell the product or service, and go from there. When the Knowledge Center becomes available, one can "jack into" it and, either working alone or in teams of one's choice, produce better and better products and services and sell them through the Center itself. (Currently, only certainly well-established knowledge industries have effective distribution networks, for example, music, books, cassette tapes, software, news, religion, government, etc., but the Knowledge Center will give all a more level playing field.)
5.4 Working Conditions
As dumb machines are replaced with knowledge machines, and knowledge becomes the main product or service, working conditions will naturally change.
For example, the idea of requiring office workers to work in a a production-style plant with acres of parking lots and cavernous bullpen offices will have to go. (Who can stand the front row managers who keep staring at the employees to make sure they look busy, even when the employees are working with their minds?) Instead, more people will telecommute by working at home or in small offices of their choosing, shipping their work via phone or mail to the company headquarters (and frequently using the Knowledge Center system). The closest thing to an old bullpen will be a bunch of knowledge engineers, each self-employed or nearly so, sharing an office resource center.
This system is likely to actually increase productivity because while some will tend to goof-off if left to work at home, many will go the other way and become totally absorbed in their work, integrating it into the cores of their lifestyles and working with their minds 24 hours a day. The author hereby calls for all "white collar" employees to begin demanding their right to work at home with a computer if it is at all possible to do so. (If some of them then realize that they need not be employees at all and begin demanding a contractual relationship with their employers, so much the better.)
Of course the necessity of relocating to take a new job will also start to disappear, as people who are successful at their work can live anywhere they want. After all, why not work in one's living room, patio, houseboat, yacht, a storefront on the main street of Leadville, log cabin near Telluride, etc.? Thus both individual companies and the state as a whole must increasingly strive to attract people based on quality of life and lifestyle (in which competition states like Colorado must surely have some advantage, too bad if they fritter it away), which, when you think about it, means that life is getting better for all.
Then the impersonal company standards, such as business suits, white shirts, hair cuts, and so on, will have no purpose (except for those who still go to business meetings): people can look any way they want.
Finally, the new economy will at last have a place for women who want to stay at home while making money, whether to reduce the strain of raising a family, or for other reasons.
5.5 A Glimpse into the Knowledge Economy
You might say that we are now about half way into the "Age of Automating Something". Any service that used to be performed manually or in conjunction with machines will be automated. This new age has four distinct phases. At first the emphasis was on mass-production machines operated by slave-like human workers. Presently the emphasis is on making machines "smart", i.e., giving them some information processing capability (for example, production-line robots, small appliances, beverage dispensing machines). Surprisingly, few now appreciate the difference between making something smart and making it knowledgeable (not to mention the difference between smart and intelligent), but when it is generally appreciated the third phase will be here.
For example, there will be new products such as the following, none of which would be possible with Knowledge Center support:
o Knowledge Kitchen, which knows every recipe ever published, and can construct a menu based on information about past menus, supplies on hand, budget constraints, available equipment, food preferences, nutritional considerations, likely guests, and so on, and then assist in its preparation;
o Knowledge Garage, which has maintenance manuals for all equipment, including video step-by-step instructions, as well as reliability data, complete knowledge of spare parts and their suppliers, etc.;
o Knowledge Automobile, which has road maps for the entire world, hotel, restaurant, service station and tourist information;
o Knowledge Briefcase, which "plugs" into the Knowledge Center and the owner's personal office files; duh, they now call it an iPod.
o Knowledge Auditorium, Orchestra, Piano (you can guess this one);
o Knowledge Exercise Room;
o Knowledge Hospital Operating Room (complete medical knowledge on-line for the surgeon, including three-dimensional color anatomy models and step-by-step operating procedures as a memory aid);
o Knowledge Zoo;
o Knowledge Museum;
o Knowledge Archaeological Site;
o Knowledge Lab;
o Knowledge Observatory;
o Knowledge Tour Bus;
o Knowledge Waiting Room (at an airport);
o Knowledge Sports Arena
The fourth phase, by the way, will be when, one day far away, machine intelligence and mechanical breakthroughs will create skill machines that can assist or replace most of the remaining service sector jobs (those which presently require a trained professional). It is to be hoped that there will not be another attempt to hold progress back when skill becomes a cheap commodity: after all, what's wrong with playing for a living (or practicing one's skill for pure enjoyment) while the machines work?
A fifth phase, which might come before the fourth, will be when humans begin knowledge engineering their own genes, something the author is not ready to talk too much about but believes he is helping to lay the groundwork for.
The author is also a believer in a coming nuclear fusion or wind economy, with abundant cheap clean energy. When it comes,it will raise everyone's standard of living automatically and increase the size of the knowledge economy at the same time (because more population can be supported): again, those who don't want to work with their minds will have the option of playing rather than working at all!
It might also be mentioned that despite the author's obvious bias in favor of the latter, the coming diversified automation and knowledge delivery technology will permit both greater socialization and greater individuality than ever before. For example, people will spend more time at home where they are sovereign rather than venture into public buildings with their complex conflicting rules and regulations, such as those regulating smoking; yet the government will have increased power to monitor people's lives and try to deindividualize the citizens with statistics-based reforms.
Since both individuality and socialization are actually concepts that one strives for, great political forces will determine the final outcome, with the West probably going the individualist route and the East the socialist (it is not expected that the mere existence of a worldwide network of Knowledge Centers will make the Chinese or Russians into individualists though it might break the back of totalitarianism).
In the West, therefore, individuality ought to make a great
leap forward, with the home making a comeback, and virtually
all mass movements in some kind of trouble: in fact, it is
precisely independent access to knowledge which makes a
member of a mass or a class into an individual. And it is
obvious that social classes will reorganize around new
criteria based on the knowledge delivery technology. We
might finally see a non-totalitarian society based on mental
capitalism, where distinction and wealth are based on actual
intellectual achievement rather than accidents of birth.
Part Two
6.0 The Knowledge Center Concept
"So that men today are in a certain sense in the same condition in which those ancient philosophers would be if they could have prolonged their old age until now." -- Blaise Pascal
"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been; it is lying as a magic preparation in the pages of books." -- Thomas Carlyle
By now the reader should be ready to appreciate the concept of the Knowledge Center System (KCS). It is a complex public utility which of necessity has many societal interfaces, and indeed its boundaries are not all that well defined because it will change society itself.
6.1 What It Is
The basic idea of the Knowledge Center System is to create an electronic warehouse of knowledge items which can be accessed remotely through electronic means and browsed until a desired item is located and then ordered, causing it to be shipped to the customer electronically and his account billed. This warehouse and distribution system will operated by the government, just as physical highways now are, to facilitate commerce.
However, the traditional concept of a warehouse is inadequate to describe this system which is almost alive in that it is also a factory for designing and manufacturing the knowledge products themselves. Indeed, many knowledge products will be design and manufacturing tools in themselves; and products can be remanufactured by the customer and turned into new ones. Also, the warehouse itself will be constantly adding value to the products by tying them together and making them easier to find.
This system will replace the current public electronic knowledge distribution system, particularly the Internet, providing an infrastructure for the knowledge economy through its facilitation and protection of knowledge commerce.
What does the KCS offer that the Internet doesn't?
First and foremost, far better control of copyright infringement. The Internet is a lawless frontier like the old American West. Do we need a hundred years to tame it? No. The KCS can be operational in a matter of five or ten years.
Second, public ownership of the means of knowledge distribution. The terminal devices will still be open to private enterprise, but even then it will likely be found in the public interest for the state to provide terminal devices to all citizens at taxpayer expense. Thus, nobody will be left out of what H.G. Wells calls the World Brain and what others call the world village.
Third, there is a basic flaw in the Internet email system in that there is no mail sorting code field, hence it is hard to implement a "mail room" that sorts mail based on codes and hence segregates "spam" (mail with no or improper mail sorting codes). Not that there couldn't be an agreement to change the basic email format, but why haven't they done it? Instead, anti-business forces jump on any bulk email advertising and seek to go to legislative bodies to criminalize it. Sadly, they might succeed, but that will only make the KCS more certain, as the same legislative bodies are then lobbied by the companies doing the advertising, citing the prior laws they get overturned as giving these bodies the power and jurisdiction to scrap the Internet and replace it with the KCS.
Fourth, with the Knowledge Center approach you don't have to know electronic addresses or domains, which are implementation details, just the catalog number of the knowledge item, and you are billed for the item while the author is paid, automatically, from state-controlled and backed electronic money, upon delivery of the item to your account. For email as for any knowledge product, people would get a lifetime account with the KCS, with full capability of mail sorting codes. Legal corporations will also get their lifetime accounts. The idea that a knowledge product is shipped once and once only to a domain as a fulfillment will be eliminated. With the KCS, once you pay for a knowledge item, you own the right to use it permanently, regardless of your current physical location. And there will be no way to use its contents to create a new knowledge item and enter it into the KCS for the purpose of commerce without being subject to its control of knowledge property rights. Thus the KCS will become the infrastructure for the entire knowledge economy of the state.
Finally, this system, by virtue of being owned by the state, will have a statutory and hopefully constitutional public mission to systematically collect complete knowledge, so that the citizens will one day have the entire stock of knowledge of humanity literally at their fingertips, the cost to the citizen being a function of the copyright alone. This fulfills the destiny of the public libraries, schools, and other public facilities and utilities that it is replacing, increasing the opportunities for civilized growth of the citizenry to the max.
6.1.1 Some Common Questions
1. What will happen to the retail stores that handle physical knowledge products like books, records, tapes? Ans. They will either cater to antique collectors ("I'd like to own one of those old 'book things', and a set of 'vinyl records' too, maybe a 'VCR tape', and display it in a display case with my old newspaper collection") or will go out of business. Those who used to specialize in giving expert advice to knowledge (as opposed to antique) collectors will package their knowledge and sell it through the KCS like any other knowledge product.
2. What will happen to the present public education system? Ans. The classroom teachers will be removed, saving the taxpayers big bucks. The teachers, if they really know their business, will transform into knowledge businessmen and produce educational knowledge products for the huge waiting market. The school buildings will be sold off and the administrations consolidated, for another huge tax savings. The few remaining buildings will be used as social, babysitting, and recreational centers with no more forced attendance for the masses with all the concealed social engineering agendas. What universities that survive will have to concentrate on knowledge discovery and collection, promoting a boom in research. The massive government involvement in student loans (a large part of which goes for needless away-from-home living expenses) will be ended. The international competition in education will be decisively won by .... THE KNOWLEDGE CLUB. The feeling that some people are getting tired of paying for the education of other people's children will be dissolved.
3. How will the KCS be financed? Ans. Since they are technology-driven, they have to evolve out of the existing industrial base. So, the earliest Knowledge Centers (what are now known as ISPs) will likely be hybrids of old Internet technology, financed by tax moneys. Since the KCS will fuel the growth of the knowledge economy, they will likely become self-financing.
4. Does this conflict with the free market system? Ans. It need be no more an intrusion on the knowledge market than highways are on the physical market system. While perhaps hurting the market for private toll roads, it will boost the market for services and products delivered over the public highways that take their place. The proposed system of Knowledge Centers would be workable either as a public or private project; however, the role of backing a government electronic money, protecting knowledge property rights, standardizing interfaces to eliminate incompatibilities, and the missions of collecting complete knowledge and making it universally available seem like classic functions for government.
6.1.2 Why Your State?
Notwithstanding the existence of the Internet, the Knowledge Center System has zero installations at this time. This is because it is the state that has to create and control it. By state I mean a country, one that is capable of autonomous police power. Today the totalitarian states use their police power to either ban or control the Internet; the perversion of the KCS to totalitarianism is not covered here, and hopefully won't happen, and if it does, won't last.
The state that I would like to see develop the first KCS is the United States of America. Perhaps a prophet is without honor in his own country, and some other state will do it first, such as the United States of Europe (Common Market). The author hopes not. The KCS will nourish an explosion in the knowledge economy of the state, and the old lawless Internet will wither quickly, becoming, if not a dead duck, a nuisance or a black market haven.
6.1.4 Benefits
Among the Knowledge Center's many benefits, the following should be emphasized:
1. Lowers the cost of knowledge delivery and facilitates commerce. Reduces pirating of electronic knowledge products. Protects the work of knowledge product authors.
2. Consolidates and optimizes the state's resources, eliminating duplication of effort and permitting the state to deal as a unit with other states and eventually coalesce with them.
3. Reduces staff requirements through automation.
4. Improves the competitiveness of information and knowledge businesses, encouraging them to physically move to the state.
5. Permits the individual to have creative expression with a minimum of investment.
6. Permits home schooling and lifelong education. The school system will be phased out in favor of lifetime membership in the KCS.
7. Permits cottage industries and telecommuting without the current problems of sales tax collection.
8. Encourages self-employment. Production plant-like office buildings will give way to personal live-in-work-in condos.
9. Reduces the cost of government.
10. Stimulates all forms of knowledge advancement, while decentralizing and neutralizing obsolete and archaic institutions.
11. Provides the knowledge delivery system needed for retraining workers whose jobs have been eliminated.
6.2 How the KCS Will Operate
This section will go into Knowledge Center System operations in more depth.
6.2.1 Cataloging Vs. Publishing
The KCS will treat all users as equals vis a vis the old consumer-producer dichotomy, and the old barriers to entry into the various knowledge product markets. As any user is free to produce a knowledge product, there will be no publishing per se, but instead a cataloging procedure for which a going fee will be charged, to help pay for the KCS and to prevent frivolous cataloging. Of course, there will always be a market for distributors, who review and promote pre-selected item lists or designer suites, pay the cataloging fee as an inducement to exclusive or non-exclusive listing, and establish a reputation.
To use the system, the user first locates a desired knowledge item in the inventory (all of which will have universal inventory numbers), and then orders it from the KCS. The item is then delivered, usually electronically, and the user is billed, also electronically. Each person's KCS account is like a combination of a bank account and a tax account. This process will likely be little different than people now experience when they fill out an online order form with their Internet browsers, except it will require no forms to fill out, only an electronic signature to the purchase agreement.
It might be lamented that this system of charging each user for the right to access a knowledge item is worse than the public library system, where much knowledge is obtained for free. This objection has already been covered in a preceding section. In essence it has been unfair to authors to circulate their works without paying them any royalties; they have to compensate by overcharging their paying customers, or by overcharging the libraries themselves. Now with a more equitable electronicized payment system, the true market prices of knowledge items will quickly establish themselves, and importantly, most authors will rapidly lower the royalties charged on their items as the market is saturated. This is how the rest of the free market system works, as for example with movies which are shown in budget theatres after they have taken their profit in the main theatres. And lastly, there will always be much public domain knowledge that is available for the distribution cost, which will itself be reduced through the increased efficiency of the new KCS, hopefully to zero.
It might also be noted that instantaneous cataloging of electronic knowledge products will be a boon to all authors because there won't be any added expense to updating a cataloged product even on a daily basis. (E.g., no longer will they have to stop the presses because of the need to update a book.) It will also permit authors to fine-tune the product versus service relationship with their customers on a spectrum ranging from a one-time published product to a continuously-updated knowledge service. If a person has purchased a knowledge item which is then re-released as a new edition or upgrade, there will be a lower price for it than for a person who has not purchased the previous edition. 6.2.2 Information Processing Activity
A major aspect of the KCS is that it is a knowledge manufacturing system, automating the routine information processing tasks (searching, sorting, retrieving, tracing, collating, comparing, indexing, editing, pretty-printing, etc.), all at electronic, rather than mechanical, speeds. Authors and researchers will never more be bogged down with mechanical chores, freeing them to be maximally creative. Moreover, there will be a large amount of automatic processing going on all the time. The KCS may be thought of as a zillion processors grinding away 24 hours a day on the inventory, quietly increasing its value, giving each person the effective use of all these processors, not just the ones in his physical location. As knowledge delivery technology progresses, the level of information processing will reach astounding heights.
For example:
1. Whenever a new item is cataloged, its internal bibliography will automatically be traced and referenced items located. Then when somebody orders this item, all the referenced items will optionally be automatically ordered also, and the exact passages referenced displayed when needed. Of course, knowledge engineering data bases will be available to tie items together on a detail level.
2. Bits and pieces of knowledge will automatically be integrated and turned into new knowledge products.
Examples:
o Indexes and bibliographies (and perhaps even biographies) will be automatically pre-created for instant access. (Compiling indexes for paper-based books is still in 2001 a big chore!)
o Histories will be correlated and collated, permitting display on a date by date basis.
o Genealogies will be automatically traced.
o Extraction processing will produce useful compilations, e.g., an automatic extraction of horoscopes from the various newspapers, inserted in a personal diary; a complete set of crossword puzzles, comic strips, "This Date in History", "Your Literary IQ" from "Saturday Review"; the complete editorials of an editor, or news reports on a politician; a comparative list of current advertised prices for a particular product, or a check of past advertisements from a single retail outlet to see if their latest "sale" price is really a bargain; a complete historical dossier on any house or neighborhood from real estate sections of local newspapers.
o Subject classification, tying together of text, and other knowledge engineering activities will be quietly going on every second in the background.
3. In place of the library's concept of a cataloging system (and it must be stressed that copyright in a state is often controlled by a state library, such as the Library of Congress in the U.S.), there will be one state inventory system and a variety of cataloging systems (which can themselves be sold as products) produced by private companies, academic societies, and government funded organizations. The tendency of the current library cataloging systems to segregate knowledge items based on their physical media (for example, giving a taped and printed version of a speech completely different call numbers) will be easy to reverse. In contrast to current cataloging systems, which only address down to the item level, an individual page, line, word, or letter can be uniquely referenced, although it is highly unlikely that anyone will be granted state ownership of the knowledge product rights to anything so small.
5. New knowledge services previously only dreamed of will be possible at a reasonable cost.
6.2.3 Broadcast Industry Impact
The difference between broadcasting and the KCS approach is that the latter provides two-way demand knowledge rather than one-way programmed broadcasts. There is no reason that the KCS will put the broadcasting companies out of business; on the contrary, they will actually increase their revenues from resales of past broadcasts, sales to distant markets, as well as the opportunity to greatly increase the number of products offered, not being constrained by the need to fit them all into broadcasting time slots or slant them to a particular geographical or time-of-day market. And the airwaves will likely evolve until all forms of knowledge products can be broadcast; for example, software and text instead of just audio and video. Of course, actual broadcasting of live shows may die as the shows are simply cataloged like any other knowledge products. But as the timeliness value of information will always be important, live broadcasting will likely survive after evolving a more newsy emphasis.
It might also be mentioned that a problem with the major broadcast networks is that they often air controversial shows financed with revenues that ultimately come (through purchases of advertised products) from many who disagree with the viewpoints. The present ugly results, such as boycotts, lawsuits, and other forms of pressure (which are completely justified because the viewers indir- ectly pay for the broadcasting), will disappear when the broadcasters' products are merely cataloged and paid for selectively via individual decision. This will end the threat of broadcast shows becoming bland, issue-free pablum. 6.2.4 Privacy, Security, Computer Crime, and Government Abuse
There is always the possibility of Big Brother taking control of the KCS system and using it to abuse private citizens or even create a totalitarian form of government. But see it this way: the government isn't the enemy, it's government AGENTS; the more numerous, the more dangerous. For instance traffic cops. They want to rake in all the money they can for the crime of going too fast. So, they hide behind billboards and wait for a speeder and then wildly chase him no matter how dangerous their actions are. So, regular travellers (truckers), who know they can safely travel long distances at speeds above the posted limit, and indeed have to in order to survive economically, use citizens band radio to inform each other of smokeys. Response: the cops begin to use radar detectors and become more mobile. Countermeasure: truckers buy radar detectors to intercept and decode signals received via scatter, maybe just in time to hit the brakes and let some vehicle in front of them be ticketed. Countercountermeasure: the cops go to the lawmakers and soon in the name of the government, after statistics are used to prove that speed is dangerous (really, the insurance companies are attempting to maximize their profits and little else), they can chase, arrest, and even destroy a citizen just for having a radar detector. But what is a radar detector? Electronic eyes and ears. To simply record what kind of emissions government agents are beaming onto a citizen's person or private property. So, the easy abuse-of-power solution of jailing people just for exercising their inalienable rights to see and hear.
Are there certain inalienable rights? People decide that, and how to protect them through government, and from government. This will never change.
Will it ever get as bad with the KCS as it is already with physical travel? How bad can it get? In Colorado just this year, 1994, they passed a law that it is a crime to be caught driving on a public road without a "license", and penalties can include the confiscation of your vehicle; when the right to travel on a public road is guaranteed to be inalienable by the U.S. Constitution, meaning that no government can charge you for it, tax you for it, license it, or provide criminal penalties for doing it per se, vehicle or no vehicle.
Since we can predict that the mentality of government to abuse power in the sake of catching breakers of its own rules will never go away, the solution to staying free is to plan on minimizing government agents in the design of the highway itself, then resolutely stonewall the "we need a law" types by the wisdom of profound apathy.
So far, small conflicts are easy. For instance, the attempt to force owners of satellite or microwave dishes to pay the broadcasters for signals received -- defeated but then stasis reached with scramblers. (As if someone could shout at you from a distance and make you pay if you happened to listened by going to the authorites.) The scramble-free solution is for those who originate one-way broadcasts to charge the advertisers for time slots just like the major TV and radio networks do; and when the Knowledge Centers arrive, the option of cataloging broadcasts as products after the broadcast is no longer live, will make the problem less hot.
The same issue in disguise is the attempt, even in America, to censor the Internet, as if the computer conduit eliminates First Amendment rights -- pretty much defeated now except for forays made to criminalize so-called hate speech, obscene speech, even annoying speech.
There is another side to the coin, namely, the collection of private data by companies and individuals, such as health records, telephone numbers, criminal records, etc. Since knowledge is so deserving of being free, the author is leery of privacy laws where the government uses its power to punish those who have come in possession of such private data. The answer lies not in criminal laws, but in the design of the system itself, the total package, so it's inherently harder to get at certain types of data by even rich and unscrupulous companies and individuals -- that takes a lot of people wanting the problem fixed at the same time and is just another argument for the KCS holistic approach.
On the other hand, the author believes that any citizen should have the right to easily and cheaply obtain a copy of all information that the government has about him, which will be extremely easy with the proposed Knowledge Centers, bringing a lot more sunshine into the government's murky corridors, and permitting the citizen to be forewarned about what other citizens can find out about him.
A last point is the issue of statistical data which the government (e.g., the U.S. Census Bureau) distills from confidential information and provides to private citizens who cleverly reduce and cross-correlate supposedly anonymous statistics to pinpoint a particular individual or small group. (For example, data about people over seven feet tall, data about professional basketball players, data about people over forty, data about black people, data about movie actors, might be cross-correlated to pinpoint something about Wilt Chamberlain, for instance, his income.)
The best solution to this problem, namely, prohibiting the government from collecting private information on the citizens, being no doubt impossible, the next best solution is to permit any citizen to demand that the government inform him every time statistical information in which private information about him is embedded is released, with an appropriate waiting period during which he can challenge the release if he can prove that it might be personalized with appropriate processing. Again, the knowledge delivery services of the Knowledge Centers will make this process easy and inexpensive for all, since it will create a market for service providers.
6.2.5 Lying, Censorship, Brainwashing, Propaganda, and Libel
The greatest deficiency in the present knowledge delivery system, in the author's opinion, is the difficulty in countering intentional lying. First there is the problem of detecting it, then the problem of correcting it, distributing the truth, and getting people to listen. All of the problems are automatically reduced with the Knowledge Center System. For example, any item in a knowledge product can be reviewed by any interested person in his own knowledge product, and the review product will automatically be hooked into the knowledge product by the KCS indexing system, available to those who wish to see it, much like a marginal note. Thus, one who produces products full of intentional lies will soon discover to his consternation that the work has been fully reviewed on a detailed level and that the readers can't be prevent from reading the reviews. Of course one is free to review the reviews, and so on, so there is no threat of giving the reviewers superior opportunities to engage in lying themselves.
With such a system fairly protecting the truth the author believes that censorship of KCS inventory should be absolutely prohibited by state law, hopefully constitutional rather than statutory. Of course there are many who will object to such absolutely universal access to knowledge, but these people are free to restrict their own access with appropriate software systems that are keyed to the reviews or advice of certain groups. Additionally, a parent can control their children's access to the system by, for example, commanding the Knowledge Center system to automatically bar access to any "adult" (a misnomer) materials.
Another problem with the classroom teaching system that was not mentioned, namely, the teacher's opportunity to use mind control and brainwashing techniques on a captive audience, will be much alleviated also. The essence of brainwashing is the use of force or coercion, but until they develop a computer terminal that can reach out and hold a person in front of it the user is the master and can turn off any knowledge product that he feels is attempting to brainwash him. As to the issue of surreptitious brainwashing through subliminal mesages, the problem is easily resolved by watchdog groups cataloging reviews of such products warning of the perceived dangers.
Propaganda, which boils down to control of knowledge sources, will be virtually impossible with the KCSs that provide universal knowledge to all. Of course, totalitarian societies will at first try to deny their need for Knowledge Centers, but when they find they can't compete with us economically without them and that complete control of the inventories is virtually impossible, they will have a real problem. Not that the U.S.S.R. didn't already find that out, but China may be resistant for a very long time.
Finally, it might be mentioned that the present disgusting trend to attempt to prevent criticism by threatening a libel suit (which can bankrupt the defendant even if he wins), can be completely reversed with the Knowledge Center System because the libelled person can have his recourse in cataloging and tying in his reviews rather than in seeking monetary damages through the parasitic legal system. This depends on the courts recognizing that this avenue of recourse obviates the need for such law suits, and accepting the defendant's motion for summary judgment based on it.
6.2.6 Archiving
A natural government function is to regularly archive, or take snapshots of the KCS inventories, for the use of future generations who will consider them objects of study in themselves, as well as those who might inadvertently erase valuable information. The massive amount of processing going on inside the KCS will make it impossible to archive the knowledge base on a nanosecond-by-nanosecond basis, but a reasonable design goal is a once-a-day archiving which is stored in read-only form for one hundred years (36500+ days stored at a time), and then compressed through special processing for longer storage. Of course this is also a responsibility of private enterprise, and the dividing line between private and tax supported archiving will have to evolve. At least the present technological trend of halving the cost of memory every few years is expected to make any amount of knowledge archived, however large, seem much smaller to future generations, so why do a skimpy job?
6.2.7 Personal Workspaces
Allied to the issue of archiving is that of providing personal accounts with storage space for private (uncataloged) information. Like archiving, this issue will have to evolve, with the Knowledge Centers probably providing a certain amount of space free (taxpayer-subsidized) and a greater amount upon payment of a fee to the KCS or private company. Of course there is the problem of government intrusion into these private memory banks, and invasion by hackers/crackers. But the advantages to be gained are a lifetime repository for work, including a personal library (lists and copies of knowledge products with private modifications, notes, etc.), that can be accessed worldwide, freeing the individual of the vagaries of his personal existence (moving, storage costs). How many of us have lost years of accumulated work or collecting because of a physical disaster to the materials?
6.3 Copyright and the KCS
The concept of copyright is an artificial government-backed property right or patent in knowledge products, an intellectual property right. This concept is the most important foundation of the knowledge economy. The copyright law was designed to encourage the distribution of knowledge products by fairly compensating the authors, which compensation should be the only object of a lawsuit, yet one sees lawsuits trying to stop distribution of knowledge. The KCS approach is to automatically bill the consumer of a knowledge product but make knowledge universally available
It might be mentioned that the producer of a knowledge product will have a right to trade secret protection until he allows the product to be cataloged in the KCS or otherwise published. Likewise, he will have no legal basis for stopping the distribution of a knowledge product which he had previously cataloged or been distributing another way, but only a right to the royalties from its distribution. If he thinks a product of his is obsolete he can declare it obsolete, raise the royalty sky high and catalog a new and cheaper edition; if it is still in demand, black market distributors will likely offer it at a discount until the author changes his mind about it.
6.4 Idearight
One of the biggest deficiencies in the present copyright law, namely, the inability to copyright an idea, can be easily rectified with the KCS. The author believes that a legal idearight (IR) should be instituted, giving the originator of a cataloged idea the right to one percent of the gross sales of all knowledge products which utilize it (with a cap of one percent on the override on any one product). This right would be easy to enforce, as it is all done electronically and the diversion of funds would be automatic and apply to all competitors, like sales tax. Its existence would fuel the knowledge economy by encouraging the creative to share their ideas rather than keep them secret until they can exploit them themselves. It would also encourage those who want to make a career of coming up with ideas rather than bringing them to market.
The idearight (IR) would work as follows:
1. A person catalogs an idea and electronically applies to the KCS for an IR. The cataloging date and time establishes priority.
2. The originator of the idea then searches new knowledge products for their use of the idea. If he finds it being used, he puts in a claim with the KCS who verifies it and establishes the fund diversion. The owners of the copyrights affected would be notified, and have a grace period to object, although few probably would because of the small size of the override, which will likely be far less than the tax rate. Note that it is the responsibility of the holder of the IR to find and make claims -- we don't want to create another huge government bureaucracy. The fund diversion would only apply to sales made after the claim is made, so that there will be no back-charging and less litigation.
3. The IR would apply to the gross sales of all knowledge products that use an idea, so that the more successful the products that use it are, the more money the IR holder would receive.
4. Because a new product might utilize several cataloged ideas, the IR overrides would equally share the one percent of gross sales, which seems fair to all parties. No one knowledge product will be assessed more than one percent for utilizing someone else's ideas; originators of new ideas will be encouraged to spread their ideas around into as many products as possible; and producers of knowledge products will be encouraged to incorporate their own ideas as much as possible.
5. To prevent a bookkeeping nightmare as new knowledge products are cataloged which utilize hundreds of old cataloged ideas, the IR would be given a rather modest time limit, say two years. After that point, the ideas would be public domain and completely free. If a person catalogs an idea and it is not used until the IR expires, he receives nothing; but no one is going to purposely wait until an IR -- and its tiny sales override -- expires to miss a market opportunity in the face of competition; and this will encour- age the idea's originator to promote and publicize it.
A possible objection is the cataloging of a fantastic number of utterly trivial ideas in the hopes for easy money. The answer is that no one can obtain an IR on an idea that has been previously published or cataloged, and that will limit the number of claims greatly. Of course the IR data base will be a record that is constantly scanned and purified by the public. Also, the cataloging fee and limited period of validity will discourage frivolous cataloging of all kinds. And after a short shakeout period, the new ideas are bound to become quite serious and exciting. Then the holder of the IR must identify the products that use his idea. It must be admitted, however, that the need to validate claims will create the need for some kind of governmental bureaucracy, but then there are already so many that one more would not be noticed; and the potential gains to the knowledge industry are too great ignore. Finally, the figure of one percent is offered for discussion purposes only and is not definite. Up to three percent seems reasonable; or perhaps a sliding scale of one, two, three, for each of the fractional periods of the IR's life. (The scale goes up rather than down to encourage quick exploitation of new ideas.)
7.0 The Knowledge Club
"The earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea." -- Isaiah 11:9
One day the author hopes to see Knowledge Centers distributed over the whole of man's domain, accessible by all and connected together, sharing knowledge on an equal basis, minimizing geography, distance, time; language, cultural, political, economic differences; and involving all humans in a cooperative effort to solve mankind's problems. At that point the whole of humanity will be a Knowledge Club, which carries nobler connotations, and indeed is more far-reaching, than global village, cyberspace, information highway, or other metaphors. (Knowledge Body, Knowledge Church, Knowledge Village -- all terms discarded by the author.)
It is the author's opinion that the electronicization of all human knowledge is the most significant event in human history, more important than the first trip to the moon. A mission of the KCS not heretofore discussed is preservation. The Arpanet was indeed originally designed to permit the society to be quickly rebuilt after a nuclear war. Its commercial potential was not seen until much later, and is now busting at the seams with all of the piracy and subversion of copyrights going on.
The first mission of the KCS, protection of knowledge property rights, having been fulfilled, and the second mission, universal knowledge collection, having also been fulfilled, then the third mission, the preservation of the knowledge, can commence.
When there is a well-developed KCS, the knowledge they maintain will be likely be consciously physically distributed in such a way that nothing less than a complete physical destruction of all of them will seriously threaten man's heritage, but a global catastrophe is still possible, so that must be carefully planned for. One idea to consider is to construct a knowledge ark that can be sent into space on an elliptical orbit, or buried deep underground, or sent to a storage location on a remote planetoid or asteroid, automatically returning after a certain number of years, thus permitting the survivors of a possible global catastrophe to salvage civilization when they build their numbers back up. With the cataloging of the human genome, it can now be hoped that not only technology but extinct life forms may some day be reconstructable from their cataloged genetic codes. This is the only realistic plan for salvaging civilization that the author knows of as well as one of the best projects for the country's faltering space program. The music of Mozart must go on.
For those who have seen the film The Wizard of Oz (1939), the author doesn't feel silly in recommending it as an accurate prophecy of the end of totalitarianism. In allegorical terms, the empire of the Wicked Witch of the West was the Soviet Union (the film made a point of Russianizing her soldiers), the Witch herself is the Communist Party, the motley band of heroes are we and our allies, and the end of the Witch came, not by trying to assault her castle with an army directly, but by sneaking in and pouring the water of knowledge on her head, easily disintegrating her while her zombie soldiers watched with fright that soon turned to wild celebration. Of course the Chinese Communist Party still is. Now the KCS is Oz, the Chinese Communist Party is the Wicked Witch of the East, and that leaves the broomstick, which the author is impatiently waiting for -- you can guess what it is.
A final prediction. The author believes that the long-term
future of planet Earth is to be de-industrialized and
systematically returned to its primeval state, with heavy
industry re-established underground, in orbit, on the moon
and planets, anywhere but beautiful mother Earth. The
billions/trillions of living humans will lucky people who
either play for a living or fuel the knowledge economy but
who know no physical labor, no earning of bread by the
sweat of their brows, except from mental exertion. And
there is an Oz somewhere over the rainbow. One day, it is
conceivable that so many problems will have been solved that
there will be no need for a knowledge economy, and all will
live a life of pure play.
The End
© Copyright by T.L. Winslow. All Rights Reserved.
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