YOUR COMMUNITY OUT OF CONTROL? 

Consider your city, town, district or village. It just grew, based on basic principals established years ago when the fastest moving vehicle was the horse-drawn milk cart.

Communities today can't raise enough money to provide those services citizens believe they are entitled to, and have been receiving continuously, in previous less-complicated times. But they still want them and ask why politicians can't provide them now? Why can't politicians accomplish what their predecessors did?

Pressure groups and pressure points are everywhere. To satisfy one often upsets others. What to do? Somewhere else a state-of-the-art fighter plane has been developed. It's so sophisticated that no one can fly it. And it's unstable. Is the local city council any different? With this modern aircraft (say, an F-18) computers are constantly working to adjust control settings every few thousandths of a second to prevent disaster. They do this by providing new information on a femto-second basis. The new settings, in turn, allow the plane to react accordingly and achieve apparent stability and superior performance.

Municipal council have a similar problems. Too much fast-flowing new age data, coupled with inadequate industrial age thinking processes. Chaos abounds. And it will get worse before it gets better.

Politicians have become very vulnerable because what they support today can be made to look stupid by technology tomorrow. A conventional library built today for $200 million (Vancouver, Canada is presently doing it) can be put out of business tomorrow by a 12-inch optical disc called SERODS. (Surface Enhanced Raman Optical Data Storage). One disc can hold the information equivalent of one million 300-page books (That is the Vancouver library). All that information will be available to anyone in the world from one location and costs less than parking your car before entering the present library. 500 people can all access one line in one book on kumquat simultaneously!

How can politicians keep up? They can't. They need a technological fix. Like a DEW (Distant Early Warning) Line to advise on what's ahead.

How often are governments obliged to back track on decisions made with insufficient information? One American city recently decided to "bash" Japan by cancelling a bulldozer purchase contract, made earlier with what they presumed was a Japanese company (that company had bid $15,000 lower than the only other competing bidder). They gave the order to the alternative bidder.

It turned out that the bulldozer they didn't buy was built in the U.S.A. and the one they did purchase was built in Japan. Today it's hard to know whose content is where.

Decisions are out of control. Misinformation abounds. It is like flying a plane in a hurricane. Things aren't always what they seem. What looks dangerous can be safe and what seems secure may be fatal. In such times only a Knowledge Navigator can show you the way. This may be the career of the future. Knowledge navigators will likely become both the prestigious wise people and billionaires of the future.

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