
                           January 18, 1995



                          THE KNOWLEDGE CLUB

                             PART 1 OF 2


                            by T. Winslow


                            -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-


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%%Opening_screen    2000
%% 2000, 0, 0, 0, 8, The Knowledge Club

   The Knowledge Club
      The Knowledge Center Concept and Plan
      Including A Proposal

   Part 1 of 2

By

   T. Winslow


(C) Copyright 1985, 1986, 1995 by T. Winslow.  All Rights Reserved.

First Edition: September 16, 1985
Second Edition: November 26, 1985
Third Edition: January 18, 1986
Fourth Edition: January 18, 1995


    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.

%%Status_line       2001
%%*
%% 2001, 0, 7, Status line
   The Knowledge Club (c) Copyright 1985, 1986, 1995.  All Rights Reserved.

%%Default_flags     6
%% 0, 100, Chapter 1: Introduction
%% 100, 0, Introduction
1.0 Introduction

	This book describes the author's working master plan for the
infra-structure of the information economy of the 21st century.

	Although this plan is admittedly incomplete, the author is
seeking funding for larger-scale planning.

	This report contains an introduction to a totally new economy
for the world, one which can start anywhere, current plans for an
"information superhighway" notwithstanding.  It not only describes
the potential for this new economy but reveals a number of ideas
for making wealth in it.

	The report is written in a smothering style attempting to
anticipate all objections in the hope that it will sell itself.  It
should be a hypertext document, but this version isn't because it was
intended to be printed on paper at some point.  Thus the mechanical,
programmed phrasing with quoted words, and large number of parenthesized
statements.

	It must be warned that the report will absolutely shock most
people because it breaks new ground and attacks several sacred cows.
This can all be to the advantage of those who recognize its potential.

	It might be noted that the author uses newspaper articles from
Colorado's two largest circulation newspapers, the Denver Post and the
Rocky Mountain News (no editorial endorsement intended).  This was done
to prove the urgency of the problems  -- they are as fresh as today's
headlines.

	A source of confusion for some is the author's plan for
creating a grand new taxpayer-funded knowledge delivery system while
at the same time heavily criticizing government institutions and
their bureaucratic employees, and extolling the virtues of private
enterprise.  The distinction to be kept in mind here is the
difference between a resource like a highway system or dam which
boosts the private economy, and a labor-intensive socialist-welfare
organization manned by government employees who soon come to believe
they own the income and begin to stifle private enterprise: it is the
latter that come under the author's guns.  In short, he rejects the
slogan that to keep "cyberspace" free, the government shouldn't have
anything to do with it; government will always be with us.

%% 100, 0, Author's Background
1.1 Author's Background

   The author, a reclusive founder of knowledge companies, is in a race
to the 21st century.  He has 20+ years of professional hi-tech experience
and an encyclopedic knowledge of knowledge delivery technology.   As a
Colorado native, he began designing this plan with Colorado in mind as
its base, and spent 10 years trying to sell its politicians on it while
keeping it under wraps.

   Well, they didn't buy it, instead their frantic reaction was a
10-year-long protection racket by Colorado's top education and law
enforcement officals to crush his program economically so they could
keep doing business the way it had been done.  He has waited for years
for organized crime prosecution of these officials to no avail.

   So, he has decided to release the report worldwide.  The author
resisted the temptation to cut-out all references to Colorado
completely.

%% 100, 0, The Coming Information Age
1.2 The Coming Information Age

	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 are
incredibly slow to catch on to the new "personal" computers and
their implications.)

      Unlike prior industrial revolutions, this one has a chance to
design itself from the ground up.  Call this the author's profession,
and this report a tantalizing glimpse of the design.
  
%% 0, 200, Chapter 2: Background

%% 200, 0, Background
2.0 Background
	
	This section contains a little background on key concepts plus a
little futurology.

%% 200, 0, What Is Knowledge?

2.1 What Is Knowledge?

	"We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge."
               John Naisbitt, Megatrends

%% 200, 0, Some Definitions

2.1.1 Some Definitions

	"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" 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.
As the quotation from Megatrends indicates, knowledge differs from
information mainly in its "salt content" and, like 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 driving 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, but magic or Gods is the only
way this can come about.  The other is high population density, where
it is technology that is the magic that can permit the same limited
resources to support more and more people in greater style.  Call the
author an optimist or a pessimist, but he believes in technology's
potential and rejects all gods and magic.

%% 200, 0, Knowledge and Man
2.1.2 Knowledge and Man

	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 with 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: we may or may not 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, its complexities a result of experience only, both as
carried over from the genetic code, and as each life unfolds).

	The existence of the human race is a real shock to those who
have thought about it.  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
"life" (e.g., could there have been "sapient dinosaurs"?), 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, then came about 500 A.D. the Western Dark Ages of
a world without large cities or learning, finally lifted about 1500 A.D.,
largely as the result of a personally-dangerous anti-establishment pre-
Christian learning revival).

	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, and so on),
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.

	As time goes 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 (I know, he's an optimist they whisper).

%% 200, 0, Knowledge and the Progress of Man
2.1.3 Knowledge and the Progress of Man

	In the struggle for survival, life forms that process external
information have an advantage.  The development 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, which somehow resulted in man.

	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), whose physical form is being
increasingly manufactured out of the planet's raw materials, and
which is busily processing the planet, turning it into a larger
"machine", of which humans are essential components!

	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 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.

%% 200, 0, Artificial Intelligence
2.1.4 Artificial Intelligence

	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 it a little at a time;
and "chess programs" impress us only with the amount of knowledge
that has been pre-processed by the programmer and embodied in the
program, because brute-force hardware solutions win the championships.)

	The author might surprise some by his opinion that the
"artificial intelligence field" 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").  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)
will be when the engineers begin to realize that what is needed is
not a faster repackaged "computer" (switch array, fixed logic
circuit, etc.) or a better "program" (in LISP or some other toy
command language), but an entirely new device which stores knowledge
directly in combinatorial logic circuits instead of (comparatively
inefficient) 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" it and setting its
internal switches (the programming language C++ takes this idea to
a near dead-end), 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, 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 a "machine" in the
mind, 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, is another 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),
and why those with "experience" 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.

	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?  (The
bible says that "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; and, 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).  This insight
should give away the phoniness of time itself: "yesterday" is a
geometric object, not in the "past", but in the present.  Hence, all
talk about "time travel", etc., is nonsense (stripped of its
mystique, time travel is merely a fantasy about rearranging the
universe).  (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!)

        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.
(The "IQ tests" are still based on indirect measurement by
statistical rankings.)  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.  (The ideal intelli-
gence test would be a real-time, dynamic, interactive sensing system
which forms successive estimates of intelligence components and
"homes in" on final estimates, using the subject's best senses for
input and output, not necessarily the eyes; 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, but not make
the mistake of considering all these types to of equal value to
civilization.)

	Therefore, as intelligence is only an ability to "capture"
geometry, "intelligent machines" are bound to be built someday.
(The stupidity of the science fiction shows which inevitably portray
a thinking machine as unable to emote or as 'feeling' somehow 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.)

	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: it will always be needed by us, intelligent machines,
or anything else we meet up with that thinks.

	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.)

%% 200, 0, Knowledge and Human Destiny
2.1.5 Knowledge and Human Destiny

	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; but the individual is part of a bigger information
processor ("society"), 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!

	It is hoped that this discussion has not "lost" the readers, as
it is important to set the stage for the "mundane" 30 to 50 year
plan to follow.

%% 200, 0, The Impact of the Computer
2.2 The Impact of the Computer

	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 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 (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.

	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.

	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 beat 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; the "HAL 9000 Logic Circuit" in the
film 2001 which goes "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!  The real test will be when a generation
raised on computers comes of age.  (The author is close to, but not
quite, one of them; he is a few years ahead of the "pack", having
first been exposed to computers as an impressionable adolescent
rather than as a child, and working intensively to understand them
ever since.)

	The greatest impact is on the economy: more and more people will
begin to make their livings with their minds, the physical capital
required to go into business being largely trivialized (with the help
of government, hopefully!), and basic needs easily provided for.  In
effect the computer is an unprecedented economic opportunity for grass
roots free enterprise that will even revolutionize the workplace and
working relationships in large companies.  (Instead, most science
fiction authors -- who are in reality computer illiterate -- have been
portraying the computer as a threat to man's freedom and dignity,
attempting to somehow take over the world and run it!)

	To bridge the gap between our present day economy with its paper
and plastic knowledge storage technology, access to significant
computing capacity limited to big company employees (and, until the
last ten years, "toy" personal computers for the rest), and the 21st
century economy with millions of knowledge businessmen making all
human knowledge (and the power that goes with it) available
electronically to each person's fingertips through nearly universal
personal computer access, this plan is presented.

%% 0, 300, Chapter 3: Current U.S. Knowledge Distr. System
%% 300, 0, The Current U.S. Knowledge Distribution System
3.0 The Current U.S. Knowledge Distribution System

	The author can't resist the temptation to examine the current
situation to highlight the need for as well as the virtual
unexpectedness of his plan.  The current knowledge delivery
industries are not doing the job, and indeed are often either
completely obsolete or in dire need of reform.  The government is
not only mismanaging the nation's publicly-funded knowledge delivery
resources, but is guilty of padding the costs through too great a
use of "employees" rather than technology.  (When you note that each
year in Colorado billions of dollars are spent for formal education,
tens of millions for libraries, yet more than 90 percent of that
money is spent on salaries rather than actual knowledge products
such as books, the mismanagement is framed like a painting.) The
key areas to be examined are the library, education, publishing
and broadcast industries.
	
%% 300, 0, Knowledge Delivery
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.)

%% 300, 0, Libraries
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 country's economic 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.
 
%% 300, 0, The Librarians
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.  (Cf.  Report
#KC-85-001).  (Now the author wonders if they will finally reveal
their real pull with publishers and book dealers by seeking to
suppress his book -- if their pressure is needed!)

	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 "invisible
threads" (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.  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 is all the fault of
librarians!

	But even this approach would now be becoming obsolete as
electronic knowledge archival media arrive, making "manual" labor
unnecessary; anyway, the whole paper-based library system is a
castle built not on sand but cellulose and its days are nearing an
end.

%% 300, 0, The Library As More than a Collection of Books
3.2.3 The Library As More than a Collection of Books

	Most so-called libraries nowadays are really just collections of
paper and plastic knowledge items, barely a step above book or
record stores.  To turn them into "state of the art" libraries will
be a massive job, best reserved for private companies like the
author's (with no apologies for self-interest).  The aim of a
library is to deliver knowledge and for this reason the patron, not
the librarian, must be made the master of its resources.  As long as
knowledge is frozen in physical products no one library can hope to
afford it all, but as a group the libraries should long ago have
pooled data on their inventories and made it available to the
patrons of every library so that each patron knows what knowledge
items there are in the world (not just in libraries), can get a
summary description of what they contain, a detail list of the ties
to other items, and what it will cost to deliver them to him.  The
schools, which are based on the libraries' obsolete method of
knowledge delivery (and hence do just as poor a job), must also be
reformed to center their education around libraries instead of
producing library ignoramuses who create yet more jobs for
librarian-babysitters.

%% 300, 0, Why Not Automating Libraries Hurts Patrons
3.2.4 Why Not Automating Libraries Hurts Patrons

	If a library contains two books or journals that are logically
"tied together" (i.e., through a reference or review), there is no
excuse for the librarians not explicitly tying them together by
pencilling a reference mark in the margin of each, creating a
"two-way arrow" that can be followed in either direction.  (Material
A might reference material B, but the readers of B would have no way
of knowing about A, as A was published after B; thus, the readers of
A are led back to B, but readers of B never find about A. This is
what makes "research" so difficult, as the reader of B must not only
guess that there is a reference to a particular item in it, but
somehow find the material A that "back references" it.) Of course
this will take much effort on the part of librarians, but if the
work is carefully organized the author believes that a single minute
of the librarians' time can save hundreds of hours of the patrons'
time, so it is actually ridiculous not to do so!

	Now for some reason, which the author believes can be traced
directly to the mediocrity of the librarians, this simple idea of
"knowledge engineering" library materials has never been thought of
much less implemented on a grand scale over the past centuries.
Thus, perhaps trillions of hours of the patrons' time have been
wasted as each strives to "reverse search" or "research" library
materials for the missing "back references", and, even if one finds
them, leaves no trace of their work for the next patron.

	Now that computers are available, there is no excuse for not
systematically compiling all of the "ties" that can be made and
providing them on the computer to all library patrons, saving more
billions of hours of patrons' time.  Indeed, there is no excuse for
not automating as many as possible of the searches that future
patrons are likely to make, either through manual Knowledge
Engineering (pencil marks) or after electronicizing the collection
itself (starting with the card catalog, then the Table of Contents,
Indexes, Bibliographies, commercial and promotional literature,
and eventually the main text, adding Knowledge Engineering software
and data bases from the earliest stages).  The only justification
needed for this work is the likely savings of hours of the patrons'
time after the expenditure of minutes of the librarians' time.

	Instead, to this day the majority of librarians prefer to keep
their knowledge of their collections in their heads and proffer
their services as "research experts" on a onesy-twosy basis that
makes them indispensible to the patrons, although the perishing of
their knowledge is but a heartbeat away.

	This outlandish example of inverted library operations in
employing a so-called "reference staff" at each library to "assist"
the patrons in "research", is responsible for untold millions of
dollars of waste and all the bad side effects and consequences of
inefficient knowledge delivery to the citizens who are paying for
it.  If the librarians had been doing their real jobs of knowledge
engineering their collections to put their knowledge in-place in the
books where it belongs, the reference staffs wouldn't be needed, or
at least only very high level questions would need to be answered,
preferably by private companies on a statewide or nationwide basis
over a computer phone network -- but is this the business of
librarians?

	In 1986 there is no longer any excuse for not tying together
every two pieces of paper that reference each other however
trivially, as well as computerizing the card catalogs of every
library with more than a few hundred volumes: a worldwide master
library inventory should be a project that was finished ten years
ago.  (Has it even begun)?  A computerized resource management
system implemented at the state level (at least), which tracks the
physical location of each knowledge item and provides for its
delivery to any patron on demand, should also have been in place by
now, saving the taxpayers millions in salaries of redundant library
employees.  Finally, a growing library of purely electronic
knowledge should have been developed and delivered through all
electronic means (phone, cable, satellite), or even by mail, to the
citizens, so that they don't need to visit libraries at all!

	Note that it won't satisfy the author to point to "lack of
funds" for failing to do the above tasks: he can walk into any
public library today and see incredible idleness of the paid
employees that gives the lie to it all.  (A few years worth of
salaries of all but the larger libraries can usually pay for all the
automation and knowledge engineering activity needed.)	

	Finally, the frequently heard (and revealing) objection that
automating libraries "takes away human assistance" should be
answered once for all: as far as the author knows, computer
programmers always have been, and are likely to remain for some
time, humans.

%% 300, 0, The Mission of Libraries
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

	For those who have read Report #KC-85-001, the following will
complete the author's criticism of libraries in general,
publicly-funded ones especially.

	1.  They seem to narrowly restrict what types or physical forms
of knowledge they will collect, often reducing their purchasing
channels to "official" pre-approved publishers.  They even have
"official" library journals (e.g., Library Journal) which tell them
which books to purchase, usually in the guise of superficial
"reviews"!  Thus, a form of institutional censorship is creeping up
on them that makes them unfriendly to the iconoclastic thinkers who
do all the real moving and shaking of society and solve its
problems.  And of course who knows how much of man's knowledge
resides in no library at all, but "falls through the cracks" or is
even banned outright?

	2.  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, the
author's 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!

	3.  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.
  
	4.  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.

	5.  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!)

	6.  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.)

	7.  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?

	8.  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.

	9.  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.

	10.  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 <QA> section; when the majority of
academic libraries began to create special Engineering libraries,
which often did not house the Mathematics books, the catalogers
began to catalog Mechanics books in Engineering <T> sections,
leaving the previously cataloged books in the Mathematics section
where they were effectively put out to pasture.) Hence, the
libraries rapidly become "knowledge graveyards" with relatively
small "active" sections dispersed throughout.  (The author believes
that the direction of academic research has actually been influenced
by the cataloging choices the librarians have made!)

	11.  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.

	12.  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.)

%% 300, 0, Knowledge Engineering
3.3 Knowledge Engineering

	Knowledge Engineering is the art, science, and technology of
knowledge delivery.  (The author invented it and this is his
definition.) 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") 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? 

%% 300, 0, Publishing
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.) Oon 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!

%% 300, 0, How to Reform Libraries & Publishers at the Same Time
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.

%% 300, 0, Libraries and Museums
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!

%% 300, 0, Courts
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."

%% 300, 0, The Postal System
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!

%% 0, 400, Chapter 4: Education
%% 400, 0, Education
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.

%% 400, 0, The Public School System
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.)

%% 400, 0, The Classroom Teaching System
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!

%% 400, 0, Classroom Socialization
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.  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.

%% 400, 0, Public Vs. Private Classroom Schools
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.

%% 400, 0, Teaching as a Profession
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.

%% 400, 0, Lectures
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, 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 "correct" (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, a non-profit institution was recently 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 recent 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).

	Even the 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!

%% 400, 0, ...and the Teaching "Profession"
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 "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.)

%% 400, 0, ...and Educational Research
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 is the recent "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
reference form is just as stupid.)

	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.

	A recent example is the failure of a local school system 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 example is the recent 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.)

%% 400, 0, ...and Computer-Aided Education
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!)

%% 400, 0, ...and Experience
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!)

%% 400, 0, ...and What is Stalling Reform
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"!

%% 400, 0, ...and the Illiteracy Problem
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 are as many as 80 million functionally-illiterate adults in
the U.S., and 400,000 in Colorado, 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!)

%% 400, 0, Other Objections
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; 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 recently):

	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.)

%% 400, 0, How to Reform Them: Teachers
4.4 How to Reform Them

4.4.1 Teachers

	The teaching "profession" 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 "grade" and "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.

%% 400, 0, Schools
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 12 "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
"credentials" 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.

%% 400, 0, Universities
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.

%% 400, 0, Ph.D Degrees
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!

%% 400, 0, The Guild System
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 an entire generation of "Ph.D"'s
obsolete along with their clunky computers -- yet they now "rule the
roost" and are even in charge of "admission" to the guild.)

%% 400, 0, Admission Standards
4.5.3 Admission Standards

	The so-called admissions standards are another abuse-prone
practice, another holdout of the European class structure society.
The denial of admission to a student because of lack of past
achievements is, paradoxically, a subconscious admission on the part
of the university that it can't add anything to a student and is
there only to get credit for his further achievements!  On the
other hand, the many present-day social engineers who are interested
in creating a "sacred cow" class seek to lower admission standards
as part of a general program to lower all standards.  Clearly, the
solution is to abolish admission standards while maintaining the
integrity of graduation standards, and this is best accomplished by
centering the "graduation" or credential-granting process on
well-made tests and not credits, attendance, and so on.

%% 400, 0, Campus Residency
4.5.4 Campus Residency

	The campus residency requirements ridiculously inflate the cost
of education.  How much of a typical college education goes on
away-from-home living costs?  (And who is really getting the
scholarship, the student or the landlord?) When it is considered
that most of the education could be obtained through a Knowledge
Center at home, the potential for a great decrease in the cost of
university education materializes.  (For those who might object that
the campus residency helps a person break away from his parents and
is a rite of passage that will be threatened, the author suggests
that here is an opportunity for private enterprise and nothing
more.)

%% 400, 0, Authoritarianism
4.5.5 Authoritarianism

	The authoritarian system of the schools is one of their most
objectionable aspects.  Instead of training leaders, the system
actually trains followers, much like the military boot camp.  In
modern America it is strangely out of place and should be abolished
as soon as possible.  Specific objections to it are as follows.

	1.  The emphasis always seems to be on conformity to authority
rather than achievement.  For example, one must complete a "course"
on the schedule set by the professors, taking "snapshot" tests which
are later held against you even though you have subsequently
mastered the material.  (Even if you repeat a course and get an "A",
this grade is usually averaged in with your previous "F" so that you
are considered a "C" student!) And the lock-step classroom system
violates everything known about individual growth, in favor of
discipline and obedience.

	2.  Then there is the authoritarian attitude which often crops
up when teachers filter (controversial) material to teach only what
they regard as the "best" rather than "all that is known".  (The
evolution vs.  creationism issue comes to mind here, the silly
debate as to whether both sides ought to be "taught" making the
author, who regularly studies them both and feels better off for it,
laugh.) And "theory" is always preferred to mere fact, as these same
professors often base their "careers" on bizarre and elaborate
theories that are judged mainly on aesthetic grounds even when they
do not account for all the facts!  No wonder there has been such an
exodus of "practical" (but highly intelligent) people from these
nut-houses, a sad episode in the history of human knowledge that it
is hoped can be mended by the proposed Knowledge Centers.

	3.  As authoritarians, almost all professors still prefer to
"explain" their subjects orally in class when it is plainly stated
in (often their own) textbooks.  (As if the class were really a
learning experience for the teacher who is frankly using the time to
polish his book or, in the case of a "teaching assistant", perfect
his skimpy knowledge so he can pass his qualifying exams.) Hence,
the poor students have to brave great financial difficulty just to
get some stuffed shirt to read to them from a book!

	Some professors even go so far as to mark down a student who
misses these "precious" lectures, although if they were interested
in the students' achievements they would let one person take notes
for the whole class to save their time!  (At the University of
Colorado in the early '80s the professors naturally made a big stink
about professional note takers attending their lectures, and now
they object to "auditors" although if they were really interested in
education they would welcome all the listeners they could get.)

	To show how well this system works, there is the following
example.  The author once took a "core" engineering course from the
Univ. of Colorado in the summer from a "full" professor who was
allowed to "teach" this subject of which he knew nothing prior to
the class, reading one chapter ahead of the class.  (Of course he
spent the lecture period recounting his personal history instead.)
This big-shot was apparently too busy to ultimately master the most
important technique of the course (which he never lectured on), and
actually gave the author a "zero" for using it to solve a certain
problem on a class exam (when another technique was used by the rest
of the class who didn't read the textbook any more than he did),
even though he got the problem completely correct except for the
last step where he purposely subtracted the final two numbers
incorrectly to test the teacher!  Naturally, the teacher's "grades"
were duly recorded and given official status in this "accredited"
university.

	Another example from the author's university experience is
furnished by his habit of solving problems in physics tests,
whenever possible, in a single line, by using conceptual shortcuts
to simplify the work involved, esp.  when the test form had an
entire page of space provided to work the problem: of course he
often got a "zero" (even when he got the right answer), the only
exception being a time when the stupid teaching assistant, while
giving the problem a "pass", added a nasty note to the effect that
the author was "lucky this time", not knowing the method used would
work for all such problems!  (He now probably has a Ph.D and is
lording it over some lucky students.)

	4.  And of course many universities gear the lower level classes
in a field to purposely fail as many students as possible because of
fear of professional competition (though they always explain it as
"limited class positions in upper level courses").

	For example, the author once took a basic Chemistry lab course,
where he was quickly identified as a non-medical student and
purposely given lower grades to justify the "A's" given the medical
students; he tested this once by switching assignments with a
medical student, who got an "A" for it while the author got his
usual lower grade!

	The author can't help comparing this system to a gym where
the instructor makes a person lift a weight once and if he can't do
it "just right" flunking him out of the gym for life!  The possibility
of the person growing and getting stronger until he can make light
work of the weight is completely neglected.  And "late bloomers" are
doomed in such a system.

      Wouldn't it be better to base "degrees" on a single, repeatable
test similar to a contest?

	5.  Even the grading system is bogus.  As mentioned before, the
final grade is often based on "snapshot" tests, attendance, and
homework, rather than a "final achievement" test alone, to measure
what the student actually carries away with him.  (The author, a
natural computer programming "whiz", once took a Mickey Mouse
programming class from one of the more arrogant (and underneath, poor)
professors who demanded that students work alone in programming the
homework assignments, although he had been giving the same course
for some semesters and all the fraternities had complete files of
worked assignments; of course the author made a point of working the
assignments with a friend, and sure enough the "crime" was
discovered and nasty, insulting "red marks" began to appear on the
returned work!  "Dropping" the course, the author re-enrolled in a
semester when the professor's "colleague" was giving the course: he
encouraged teams of people to work the homework assignments
together, and the author received an "A" for the course!)

	 Again, the date for the "final test" is fixed so that a student
gets permanently "marked" even though he might brilliantly master
the material days, weeks, or years later (prior to his
"graduation").  (Or have to take two finals at the same time, as
happened to the author once when he took two courses that met at the
same time period -- luckily he managed to finish both exams in the
period allotted for one.)

	6.  And of course the "grade point average" is another phony
measure of student performance, placing emphasis on the average
grade (or conformity level) received, regardless of the course, and
taking no account of the number of courses taken, or the time period
of study: thus, a student who takes the minimum number of courses
needed to graduate, and who jockeys his schedule to get the
"easiest" teachers, smallest possible course load, and otherwise
pays attention to grades ahead of real knowledge, will be evaluated
as a student leader!  (At the Univ. of Colorado the author took
many beginning foreign language courses which were jammed with
students who were already fluent in the language but wanted an easy
A to raise their GPA's!)

	The obvious fallacy in the GPA is that it is an incomplete
measurement.  In electrical terms it is like metering your
electrical outlet by taking the voltage reading instead of the
energy reading which is voltage times electrical charge.  In other
words, a more useful statistic would be the sum of grades times
credit hours, not grade average.  Or better, the averaged grades,
the sum of grades x credit hours, and sum of grades x credit hours
divided by semesters of study, should all be calculated and used for
a more fair multi-dimensional evaluation of performance, although
none of these should even matter if the student can pass a final
achievement test or demonstrate real achivement through a creative
act.  This whole episode of the GPA is just one more reason to
abandon the classroom schools and their idiotic attempts at social
control.

	7.  Understandably, the degrees themselves are lightly regarded
by the (better quality) university faculties themselves, who usually
evaluate people on entirely different criteria, such as their
publications, and aren't even required to hire "degreed" people at
all!  (The author could point to many unfavorable reviews of
articles in academic journals based on recent dissertations, one
reviewer even suggesting that such articles carry a warning:
"dissertation: beware"; and often the top people in a field are
lacking a doctorate.) (Of course the mediocre institutions are the
ones that blindly require a doctorate for new faculty members.) In
other words, the university system is made to work by bypassing its
formal structure entirely!  So why isn't that structure modernized?

	8.  And the way that authoritarian academic departments "take
over" so-called "fields" of knowledge, as if they own them, is
outrageous.

	For example, there is always one or more "literature"
departments, although just why those who did not actually write the
literature should be the "professors" is unclear.  (What does a
grade of A in "literature" mean anyway, except that the good little
student obeyed the professor and studied what he demanded?) And how
did the study of the collected published fantasies of other people
become a "field" in itself anyway?  How does one "master" it?  By
reading everything published, by learning how to produce new works?
No: usually it is by publishing a "theory" explaining often
far-fetched connections in this "body of knowledge" ("the romantics
are just like the modern post impressionistic neoclassicals in
...")!

	Another example is "history": apparently only those who have a
foothold in the academic pyramid are recognized as "real"
historians, although just what special "qualifications" a person
must possess to write about the past escapes the author entirely,
much less what the subject matter of the "past" even is; apparently
even those who lived in the era written about are often abused as
unqualified!  Again, this artificial "field" has its "officials"
(saints) and "official works" (sacred works), and "theories",
especially when it comes to economic, political, and racial
histories.

	Another example is "anthropology", which would better be called
"inferiology", the study of inferior peoples.  Apparently the
initiates in this "field" are split into three groups, those who
believe that the peoples studied are innately inferior, those who
believe they are only apparently inferior, and those who believe
they are somehow superior -- few question the validity of the
"field" itself, for instance, why they don't use the money now paid
the professors to pay the "natives" themselves to go to school and
write their own histories!  (It is doubtful that it would have been
born, or have survived, if it didn't have the present university
system to keep it going.)

	Yet another example is "geography", which in recent years has
all-but been taken over by leftist demographers who fill their
"official" textbooks with pure social statistics, and leftist
"solutions" to social problems, duly grouped geographically!  (The
author hastens to point out that he isn't against the study of
literature, history, other cultures, or geography -- indeed he is
well read in these areas -- just the setting up of "official"
pyramid schemes at universities, which practice is hopefully going
to be abolished when the Knowledge Center equalizes all and puts the
emphasis back on the knowledge products themselves and not on who
produced them.)

	Even the splitting up of natural philosophy into various
"sciences" is doomed to extinction.  Science (from the Latin word
for knowledge), the organized discovery and collection of knowledge
about the information processing of the universe, is utterly
dependent for its progress on knowledge delivery technology, and the
specialization of its workers is a result of sheer low knowledge
productivity; hence the author believes that the specialization of
scientific disciplines is a direct result of the primitive state of
the knowledge delivery system and likewise will tend to disappear
with the coming of the Knowledge Centers.

	Finally, the whole idea of awarding "chairs" to "professors" in
academic "departments" frankly sucks.  With this dumb system, a
"professor" of some narrow, nerdy subject that has virtually no
definition or value (philosophy, literature, anthropology, to name a
few), gets an "official" position in the university, along with all
kinds of special rights and privileges (and salary), while a much
more brilliant and valuable person who is contributing to a field
that is already "full up" with dead-weight geriatric professors, or
which he himself is pioneering, gets no respect whatsoever and might
even be considered as an outsider and troublemaker and banned from
the campus for interfering with its academic functions!  (The author
speaks from experience.)

	9.  Naturally, the universities, who are supposed to be
society's major institutions devoted to the advancement of
knowledge, have stumbled past the Knowledge Center approach and even
worked against it by discriminating against thinkers who belong to
no school, undegreed self-taught people, generalists; by encouraging
the fragmentation of knowledge through "departmental libraries"; by
attempts at control of publishers (as in the famous Velikovsky
affair), research (by requiring guild-like "credentials" to get a
contract); and so on.

	10.  Then there is that strange focus on making the
"undergraduate" experience a "rite of passage" for initiation into
"higher learning", as if learning begins and ends in that period.
(Most academic materials published nowadays specify whether they are
for "undergraduate" use.) Isn't our society advanced enough to
recognize lifetime learning as the true goal?  (Again, the Baby
Boomers are the pioneers in late-life open-enrollment community
colleges and continuing education for professionals.)

	11.  And for that matter, why do the universities seek to narrow
the student's focus down to just one "major"?  With a lifetime in
which to study, the university should be a lifetime connection where
an individual learns many "fields" at various times.  Humorously,
these universities, who now are facing a budgetary crisis as the
Baby Boomers have been cycled in and out, would have no crisis at
all if they would have cultivated the lifetime connection all along!

	12.  One of the author's biggest gripes with the present system
is that it forces decisions on people when they are not ready.  For
example, why is "eighteen" such a magic age for university
commencement?  What about late bloomers, those who are graced with
prolonged adolescence?  (Remember that the chimpanzee is smarter
than a human up until a certain age because it matures faster, but
then the human passes it up and goes much farther.)

	13.  Then there is the degrading over-specialization forced on
the individual to get his "doctorate" and in effect make lifetime
decisions even when he is not sure what knowledge is even like.  The
author would like to see a new curriculum which encourages a wide
sampling of all forms of knowledge before specialization is
attempted (the old idea of a "liberal education").  Perhaps the
British terminology of "reader" rather than "degree candidate" is
better to describe such a student.

	14.  Finally, there is the campus universities' self-imposed
isolation from society, even when the general level of society is
much higher than theirs!  In the 60's, especially, when going to
college was a popular way to avoid being drafted (even though many
colleges were run like boot camps), the campuses turned into little
unreal isolated worlds whose real economic supports (the parents!)
were so well disguised that bizarre fantastic social theorists
nourished themselves in great numbers; when they finally entered the
mainstream economy most students quietly laid their fantasies back
in the toy box (and of course now shun the campuses).

	Of course the Communist Party saw its chance and "infiltrated"
the universities where they now sit in large numbers lecturing to
nearly-captive audiences (who need the "credit" for their
"degrees"), perverting "academic freedom" into legalized
brainwashing.  (The authoritarian platform that an Economics,
Political Science or Social Science "professor" has in a classroom
makes a joke out of the claim that there is any kind of free debate
permitted among the students.)

	Yet, as the author found out to his satisfaction, the
isolation is often a one-way street as the officials who run the
universities call on their police as tools to protect their turf
and income whenever it suits them!  The net result is that the
giant University of Colorado campuses are burgeoning police
states, nurtured by a mistake made a hundred years ago, where
the university was chartered in the state constitution as an
independent arm of the state with the governing board not
appointed by the Legislature, but elected alongside it, and thus
feeling above its oversight, and the law itself.  After it got to
be the biggest kid on the block, certain unscrupulous politicians
saw their chance to create a police state where there is a
standing army controlled by themselves, who disarm everybody
else, order citizens jailed at will, especially for rocking the
boat, and owns the courts which are used to justify every police
action, hiding their padrones' orders and contacts at will to
operate by deception and impersonation to get around the public
as necessary.

	Thus, the isolation of the public campus from society results in
the creation of a miniature bureaucratic socialist state which often
abuses the citizens who created it.  It is time to kill the monster
by stabbing it in its heart (the library), and choking off its
breath (the classroom) for good measure: then, having cremated it,
society can provide what it really needs for itself without it
getting in the way or exacting tribute.

%% 400, 0, Government Research Contracts
4.5.6 Government Research Contracts

	Despite the medieval relics the university system embodies, it
has a stranglehold on its market through government support.  Almost
all universities nowadays, including the "private" ones, are deeply
in the government trough, and consequently the faculties are often
formal or informal government contracting companies.

	The bizarre thing here is that the government will fund the big
salaries and overhead of "professors" to study something of which
they say little is known, but the "students" have to pay the
universities for the privilege of studying the same subjects.
(Often a "professor" gets paid to study a standard subject if he
didn't learn it while he was a "student"; while an "unqualified"
student of a fast-moving new field might actually know more than his
"professor" whose mind turned to stone before the field changed.)

	The only justification for this pyramid system is that it is
supposed that a person cannot discover or create anything new unless
he knows what is already known (as for example with the old sages
Fermat, Mozart, Newton, Einstein, Lennon); but anyone who has
actually studied under this system has had his mind subjected to
such intense pressure to conform that his creativity has been all-
but stifled and he would have been better off if he could have
bypassed it entirely!  The true reason the system is structured this
way is that the government bureaucrats cannot deal with anybody
unless they have a "title" that they can label them with: hence, a
class society organization is just what they are looking for!

%% 400, 0, Professional Associations and Licensing
4.5.7 Professional Associations and Licensing 
	
	One of the abuses of the university system is its hijacking by
professional associations to limit entry into their job market.
In every state of the U.S., a "license" is required to "practice"
medicine, law, and even engineering, (and of course teaching) and
always a requirement for the license is graduation from an
"approved" or "accredited" university, often with a required period
of apprenticeship to previously-licensed professionals to further
restrict competition.  (Since engineering is nothing more than
thought applied to solving man's problems, we see a future opening
for Big Brother to require people to get a license before they can
think!)

	Passing a thorough test, no matter how brilliantly, is never
accepted as sufficient, because the university admissions are under
the control of the associations and they arrogate to themselves the
right to choose their own competitors!  Instead, the licensing tests
are often rinky-dinky or downright idiotic (e.g., when a civil
engineer can answer some electrical engineering questions to get a
higher score), as they must be to "pass" the herd graduating from
the universities, especially the "good old boys" (and now the
"sacred cows").

	In fact, the professional license is increasingly becoming known
as, not a credential of evaluation, but a piece of property!  (The
NY Court of Appeals obligingly ruled just this in a divorce case
recently.) This is exactly what happens when government entangles
itself with the private economy (in this case through "professional
associations"), invevitably distorting and weakening it.

	Of course, the associations always try to justify not only their
existence but their stranglehold on the marketplace with horror
stories of a quack, fraud, or incompetent, but they seldom mention
that such misconduct is punishable under civil laws anyway, and
there are plenty of horror stories about licensed professionals too.

	The other side of the coin is that the current system produces
hordes of mediocre specialists whose main characteristic is their
socialization and domination by the associations!  (Most people
still don't realize the difference between a specialist and an
expert.) And with the coming Knowledge Centers it would be easy for
certain groups to establish an easily-consulted knowledge service
which reviews and evaluates professionals individually.  Hence, the
public has been sold an unnecessary "protection racket" which only
raises the cost of services.  (Note that the author is not against
professional associations per se, only their mandatory
government-backed licensing system which gives them an unfair
control over the marketplace.)

	One example from the author's experience clearly shows the true
intentions of the licensing requirement.  When the author once tried
to incorporate a "software engineering" company in the state of
Washington, the state engineering board threatened prosecution
(with all the resources of the state at their disposal) unless there
was a "licensed engineer" attached to the company, even though there
is no "software engineering" license or test!  (Apparently we needed
a civil, electrical, or mechanical engineer on the "payroll" to
satisfy them, although those qualifications were of little or no
value to the business the company was in; and of course the author,
who could have easily "qualified" himself by taking the
anachronistic test in electrical engineering technology, declined to
do so.) When the author then changed the company's name to "software
automation", they left him alone!  One now wonders if a "household
engineering" (or housecleaning) service, a musical band with the
title of "The Engineers", or even a "knowledge engineering" service,
would come up against the same nasty, narrow-minded, anti-free
enterprise bureaucrats who apparently think the legislature has
given them ownership of a word!

	The author hopes that with the coming of the Knowledge Centers,
the graduation requirements can be eased if not dropped altogether;
and conversely, that the licensing tests will be made so valid that
the "good old boys" (professional association members) will not be
able to automatically pass.  (Better yet, the licensing tests should
be repeated every so many years to insure continuing education of
the professional.) And most importantly, licenses should be made
voluntary for those who want to add them to their "credentials" or
think it will improve business, but not made a legal requirement,
punishable by the criminal courts, particularly when there is no
"victim".

%% 400, 0, Community Collegs and Urban Universities
4.5.8 Community Colleges and Urban Universities

	In the last couple of decades there has been a growing movement
to integrate institutions of higher learning with their surrounding
communities.  (Denver has one of the leaders in the Auraria Higher
Education Center).

	While the author likes their wider ("non-traditional") course
selection (although he doesn't like the new "soft" courses used as
an excuse to avoid mastering the sciences and technology) and (their
attempts at) open enrollment, and believes that they have been
safety valves for those dissatisfied with the mainline university
system, the Knowledge Center concept makes them completely obsolete
(except for vocational training which requires physical workshops or
laboratories).  Thus, for example, the Auraria Campus in Denver
already seems outdated and outmoded by the new Knowledge Center
concept, justifying its abolition and transformation into a prime
Knowledge Center site.  Anyway, why strive to integrate the
university with the "urban community" when the Knowledge Centers
will integrate all education with the home, which goes much farther?

%% 400, 0, Nonessential Activities
4.5.9 Nonessential Activities

	The author would also like to see the universities get out of
the sports promotion business, music promotion, and anything else
not directly connected to the advancement of knowledge.  The virtual
take-over of what amounts to the minor sports leagues by
universities has led to a number of idiotic excesses, such as
watered-down degrees, another sacred cow class, not to mention the
shutting out of those who don't attend a university or who didn't
engage in sports while attending.  If the trustees of private
colleges still want to invest their spare cash in professional
sports teams that is something different; and promising athletes
can still be hired out of high school by professional teams at low
wages and "raised" as they become valuable to the team, thus
bypassing the university's "farm system".

%% 400, 0, Professional Training
4.5.10 Professional Training

	As for professional training, this should have nothing to do
with university education!  For certain well-paying vocations,
such as engineering and medicine, why don't the larger companies
simply hire the promising but untrained person early and pay him
to improve his professional attainment, substituting "raises" for
"grades"?  (This is a far better inducement for most people, and
professional education is often subsidized by the employer anyway
once the professional gets hired.  For example, the author was once
sent, as an employee of a large company, on an all-expense-paid
vacation to UCLA to listen to a lecture series which could have been
put on cassette tape and sent to him for a fraction of the cost: the
classroom was full of freeloaders like him too!) The medical and
legal professions, in particular, seem to make a big point of
requiring candidates to first get a general college education as if
they are expected to never have a chance again: but the Knowledge
Center, as a lifetime learning opportunity, will always be there
anyway, accessible even "on the job".

%% 400, 0, Seven Points
4.6 Seven Points

	As to reform, Carlyle's statement that "the true university is a
collection of books" comes to mind.  A real university would have
no business in running academic institutes, classrooms, or
professional schools, not to mention music, sports, and art
departments!  (These organizations would of necessity be independent
and share, along with everybody else, the university's resources
with no special privileges granted.) When the Knowledge Centers are
successfully functioning in our state it is hoped that the
university system will be abolished altogether as a monolithic
institution (so that taxpayers are paying for knowledge processing
and distribution per se and not indirectly through the care and
feeding of a monstrous institution plagued with internal power
struggles), and what remains extensively reformed along the
following lines.

	1.  Complete electronicization of the knowledge base.

	2.  No more forced lectures, classrooms or classroom teachers,
no more than recommended curricula, and no more semesters.  (The
current room-and-board classroom campuses closed down, with some of
the urban and rural community colleges remodeled as mini Knowledge
Centers serving the public generally.  The research universities
reorganized around the new Knowledge Centers.)

	3.  No more focus on getting a "degree" or other status symbol
but rather in getting knowledge and doing something with it.  (The
individual, not the institution, is primary, and hopefully the
status title in a pyramid scheme mass institution will go the way of
the hereditary title of nobility and be replaced by individual
reputation.)

	4.  Credentials granted as the result of tests (or better,
actual creative achievements) and not attendance, residency,
credits, or group status.  No more state-forced "licensing" of
professionals, with the remaining voluntary licensing based on
individual testing that will not include consideration of "degrees"
granted by institutions of any kind.

	5.  No more specially-privileged "faculty" but rather treatment
of all users of the university resources as equal.  The former
"professors" can work as consultants for themselves or for private
or government-endowed research institutes.  The state may still
award contracts for research, test construction or even
educational knowledge product development (but not too much!) based
on the reputations of the bidders and the merits of their propos-
als; but the university must be thoroughly integrated into the
general community so that no "official" status is required to make
full use of its resources including monitoring or participating in
on-going research projects.

	6.  No more "tuition" paid to a monopolistic university that
uses it for other purposes (such as research) but rather the paying
for knowledge products and services (including achievement
evaluation) on an individual basis in a free market knowledge
economy.

	7.  Knowledge collection, research, and as a sideline,
evaluation -- the only proper businesses for a university,
especially publicly-funded ones.  The "academies" cut loose from the
university and made into separate entities with their own funding
responsibility.  The Knowledge Center made the true central focus
of, if not the entire, "university": labs, field sites, and other
producers of new knowledge, passing it towards the Center, where it
then becomes available to all of society, "academic" and otherwise.

 	In sum this will entail a restructuring of the universities to
eliminate the domination by the academies with their pyramid
schemes, the large campuses and associated administrations, the
authoritarian classrooms and lock-step graded pacing system, and
indeed the need for physical attendance (except when laboratories or
other physical resources are necessary); a centering of all academic
functions around the Knowledge Center, to permit working on
knowledge products whether as a "student", "professor", or
otherwise; an elimination of all government college-level teaching
positions, especially the "tenured" sinecures; and a scrapping of
the graded institutional curriculum in favor of much higher quality
achievement testing when required or requested (to which some of the
many unemployed classroom lecturers can direct their talents).  And
the state and federal governments must be reformed to use the
Knowledge Center approach in their funding of research contracts,
test development, and so on.

%% 400, 0, Scholarships Vs. Venture Capital
4.7 Scholarships Vs. Venture Capital

	Lastly, for those who wish to "support" education through
financial contributions, the author suggests that all moneys be
given directly to students and not to institutions that siphon it
off for parasitical employees masquerading as teachers; this if even
in the form of educational vouchers.  This is a seemingly small
observation, but when the purpose of a scholarship degenerates to
the payment of tuition, room and board, and books for attendance
at a school or university, all of which are obsolete impediments
to real learning in themselves, the reader should by now understand
how stupid and wasteful it really is.  Instead, a real scholarship
would pay for a decent standard of living for the scholar, as well
as access to all required knowledge for his work, which could often
be done entirely at home: it is indeed desirable that no institution
would ever see a dime of it.

	And for those recipients for whom it makes sense, a new
experiment should be tried in loaning "venture capital" to
"knowledge businesses" (the former "students") to be repaid out of
future profits.  This will encourage real responsibility (which is
ultimately economic), and the massive government student loan
program will be made unnecessary (or less necessary) in the flood of
private investment capital that will flow to the worthy recipients
(those whose support will likely result in an eventual return on
investment -- the only worthy recipients!)  And no, "discrimination"
is not an issue because no venture capitalist is going to pass up
the opportunity to make money if it is there to be made!

	Note that this simple change in approach will increase the
number of recipients of funding because, as venture capital
transactions, the "deals" will often be a "piece of the action" of
the future knowledge businesses (ironically it is the high-paid
doctors and lawyers, often self-employed, who do not pay back the
government student loans!), hence the success of the top achievers
will result in a larger return on investment which will enable more
chances to be taken on the less attractive risks or long-shots; and
with the new Knowledge Centers, higher education costs will plummet
anyway.  (The government's attempt to garnishee income tax refunds
and even government paychecks to repay the loans is already such a
de facto endorsement of the author's proposal to make argument on
the issue seem superfluous; in any case, it is the private sector
that must take the initiative here.)

%% 0, 500, Chapter 5: The Coming Knowledge Economy
%% 500, 0, The Coming Knowledge Economy
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 is another victim of Colorado's poor knowledge
distribution system.)

        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.

%% 500, 0, The Great Migration
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 50 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".

%% 500, 0, The Meaning of "Economy"
5.2 The Meaning of "Economy"

	A common source of confusion is the meaning of "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 "skill" 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.)

%% 500, 0, Employment Relationships
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
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.)

	As to the frequent claim that government contractors should be
counted as government employees, this is the sad truth as long as
there is no real competition in the contracting marketplace; the
government as an employer seems to poison all that it touches.

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!  (The author delights in labelling himself
as "unemployed".)

	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.)

%% 500, 0, Working Conditions
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) 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.

%% 500, 0, A Glimpse Into the Knowledge Economy
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;

	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

	That the Knowledge Economy is not here yet is also evident when
you note that knowledge producers are fragmented into a number of
industries based on technology and distribution rather than subject.
For example, the hundreds of monthly pages of Byte Magazine are
filled with announcements of new computer software products, but
rarely a computerized literary work, newpaper/magazine, music
product, etc.

	In fact, despite the production of more and more computerized
literary tools such as online dictionaries, thesauruses, syntax
analyzers, etc., most authors are afraid of publishing a literary
work in computer form because of the ease of copyright violation!
Instead they use a word processor to produce the manuscript and then
print it out on paper for submission to a traditional publisher: the
thought of making the literary work processable and readable only by
a special "reading processor" on the diskette, which can naturally
make the work "executable" and capable of modifying itself based on
user requests or other inputs, being overlooked by writers and
programmers alike.  (The word processor makers are incredibly
lacking in creativity and blindly copy each other rather than sit
back and work out new concepts such as a reading processor.)

	Another example is the "movie".  Although film companies have
long treated a "movie" as an integrated knowledge product that
combines separately-contracted artwork, audio and visual graphics
designs, a script, and so on, and which will be marketed in
conjunction with yet other contracted or licensed products such as
comic books, toys, t-shirts, and computer games, few even now
realize that the entire collection of products and product designs
could and should be packaged as a single knowledge product and
distributed electronically.

	Of course the consumer electronics market is also fragmented,
without even a single example known to the author of an integrated
knowledge delivery center consisting of TV, radio, computer,
telephone, tape and disk players, and hookups to antennas, cables,
the telephone line, etc., packaged into a single cabinet.  Yet the
future Knowledge Economy will need to integrate all forms of
electronic knowledge so that a particular product will contain text,
video, audio, and executable computer programs combined into a
systemic whole.  (This is one of the motivations for the Knowledge
Center concept.)

	Thus, one day soon all knowledge products will be integrated
technologically so that writers, artists, entertainers,
advertisers, businessmen, engineers, scientists, and every other
type of knowledge producer, will produce integrated products that
make use of video, audio, computer processing equally.

	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 "fusion 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
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-communist) society based on mental
capitalism, where distinction and wealth are based on actual
intellectual achievement rather than accidents of birth.

%%

