Lessons From The Future

 

 

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Volume II
Lessons From The Future

MAISY SCHWARTZ-21ST CENTURY MANAGER  

She isn't a fighter pilot, or even a submarine commander. But the physical and mental activities she is engaging in resemble those of a helicopter pilot, once considered by neurosurgeons to involve the most difficult learning processes known to man.

Maisy Schwartz is C.E.O. of a multi-billion dollar 21st Century global business operation, and she is simply spending another day at her "desk". She has the world at her fingertips. She also gets paid a cool one million dollars a year plus bonuses and rated-withproductivity options. This is a possibility. Advanced technology already in the prototype stage and concept architecture out of DARPA, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Planning Agency, indicates that such an economic war scenario is not improbable. And, as we learned from the past, business is the first to utilize relevant technological war developments for commercial operations. Ms. Schwartz is wearing a virtual reality helmet that allows her to enter any reality within or outside her corporate world. Such realities can be possible or even supposedly impossible. All may have a related bearing on decisions she has to make. She has to personally make decisions in any particular operation or problem that may crop up in her corporate empire. Maisy has already spent several years training for her position by operating in thousands of such "realities" under extreme pressure. She was the "survivor" out of 67 applicants who made the final short list for the position. She previously worked as an alligator wrestler at a Canadian tourist "safari farm".

Ms. Schwartz uses her right foot pedal to retrieve past archival histories and the left one to call up anticipated future trends. Trend scenarios are available in multi-media, full color, interactive combinations with instantaneous language translation from various global sources. Her left hand controls global sweeps of real time, satellite-delivered video of the corporations communications network, various plants or offices. If the time zone is not compatible with head office schedule, taped videos show the last day's activities of that office or factory with live conversations available with the corporate staff duty officer at that time.

The right joystick controls JIT (Just In Time) inventories and hookups to suppliers involved in each plant or office. Microphones and "firing button's" on the head of the right joystick allow her to talk in verbal or two-way color video phone mode, and send fax, voice, electronic, thought-wave and/or mindlink communication to any desknode under corporate control. Two dozen constantly-changing 3-D video monitors arrayed in front of her desk monitor world-wide activities both within and beyond her own corporate activity. These beneficial screen processes are an extension of the early 1990s concepts dreamed up by Norman Bushnell, founder of Pong, the world's first video game, who also founded the AApps Corporation of Sunnyvale, California which produced Digi-TV, the first running news screens for standard home computers.

Advanced fully-swiveling platforms came as an outgrowth of the 1990s movie LAWNMOWER MAN which showed increased brain activity when operating from a centrifuge spinning process on a free-wheeling platform (a system somewhat similar to that used by witches in the Dark Ages when they "spun" into a trance while swinging in their "Witches Cradle"). The executive chair became the comfort concession brought in with business applications.

A firing pin button allows multiple switching for matching sound with each video screen, although after much practise, sounds can be anticipated with a high degree of accuracy without actually listening. Another development from the 1980s, when satellite video monitoring personnel found the sound not necessary for fast-forward viewing of world news videocassettes.

 

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