TOMORROW'S OFFICE: ONE PERSONWITH DIRECT MIND/COMPUTER LINK 

StatsCanada has revealed some astounding facts. Almost 90 percent of all new jobs are being created by new companies with 20 or fewer employees. About 62 percent of the total work force works for companies with five or fewer employees, and 82 percent for companies with ten or fewer staff. It's not only computers that are getting smaller.

But how many operations have only one or two on staff. They may be tomorrow's surprise. Why? Because they may be doing more dollar value of business and showing more net profit per person than companies only slightly larger! A surprising number of very small companies have "gone global" ... a possibility never even considered in the past. Why? Because we have reached a level of technical competence today that allows us to perform so much with so few people. That this number of solo entreprenurs could possibly increase, or even raise the per person productivity level seems incomprehensible. But with today's technology and what is already in the pipeline it does seem a probability. Government action is the cause of the speeded-up process. This wasn't the way it was planned, but then governments are the last to recognize the First Law: The Law of Unintended Results: Any law, rule, regulation or sanction conceived with industrial age thinking reverses itself in a communications age environment".

Governments, in a move to appease workers in failing old-style factories, try to financially support companies no longer viable. In so doing they pass such laws as making company officials responsible for: separation pay, vacation pay, pension payments, unpaid salaries and taxes. Governments are laying down laws about who shall be unionized -- perhaps all companies with more than 20 workers has been suggested. As a result, new companies are forced to stay as small as possible, sometimes creating other companies if necessary, with whom they subcontract, just to keep their company below the dreaded "fatal limit" ceiling. They put into effect a permanent hiring freeze. Net result: it stifles jobs, instead of saving or increasing jobs. But, it does make small companies very efficient.

In Germany there is the mid-size equivalent, the Mittelstrand, similar to our small companies in Canada. The Mittelstrand produce 67 percent of the German Gross National Product (GNP ) and 30 percent of the exports. All these companies have fewer than 500 employees. They make German exports total of $421 billion, topping both the U.S. $394 billion and Japan's $286 billion. The Mittelstrand spend 20 percent annually on research and development and up to $18,000 a year to train apprentices for four years. Apprentices are selected and hired while still in school!

What is about to happen next will allow one-person companies to do what, until now -- throughout the entire history of mankind -- was just not possible -- input of direct thought into a computer. To allow one person to edit videotape or printed copy using the mind -along with a bit of technology -- alone. Those who first latch onto this emerging technique will have unbelievable power, certainly more than a 50-person operation not aware of how to capitalize on the "marriage" of mind and technology. The per capita "production" of such a person will exceed anything known in the past. Decision-making will take micro-seconds and the finished project will take a fraction of the time, cost and materials formerly required. Profits will be astronomical but the market price offered will be much less than what would have to be charged to produce the same effect with our present system. Such effective one-person operations will have no competition.

For seven years now I have been playing with bio-feedback equipment that allows me to manipulate my own alpha and beta waves to turn my computer on or off, tell it to run a program or my printer to print. Without using my hands, without speaking verbally, I can do what otherwise was previously physical labour. The one drawback was the wire running from what-looked-like-a-hippie-headband to my computer. We are about to throw away that wire.

Every satellite dish has a LNA (Low Noise Amplifier) or a LNB (Low Noise Block). Either device takes the exceedingly faint signal (quieter than a snowflake falling) from geo-stationary satellites located 22,300 miles altitude over the equator. The LNA amplifies that signal up to 200,000 times and provides all the sound and picture signal required. Picture that miniaturized to the size of a hearing aid. A hearing aid that would pick up the even fainter electrical/chemical signals that are human (or animal) thought waves. One could then, for example, through such a "hearing aid" tell (via infra-red transmission -- like a TV zapper) your "smart" bulldozer outside, that carries its own computer system, to run Program 17. It would. Program 17 is to move that mountain.

Mohammed would be proud.

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