NEW KID ON THE BLOCK --THE KNOWLEDGE NAVIGATOR 

Information and its filtered successor, knowledge, is now flowing in so many new streams, from so many new fountainheads that few people are able to keep up. What to do? Call the Knowledge Navigator.

Look all around you. Neither governments nor schools nor corporations are equipped to handle the vast and increasing Niagara of new information spewing out from thousands of data volcanos around the world. Life was far simpler when only a few locations, in even fewer countries, had the ability to generate new knowledge. Yesterday's jungle natives now operate in such sophisticated electronic environments as the "smart" building operation of the Sabah Foundation, in Koto Kinabelu, Sabah Province, Borneo. Similar establishments are popping up throughout South East Asia. Many are keeping up with phenomenal change.

How can they do this?

By tracking change and new knowledge and realizing that new knowledge is useful if you learn what to do with it once you catch it.

A course in such adroit intellectual gymnastics is not yet included in any school curriculum, government re-training seminar or North American corporate re-training program. Why? Because so few Knowledge Navigators exist that hardly anyone realizes that all this new knowledge is easily accessible, at reasonable cost but involves navigational approaches not found along conventional highways. While the unknown is harder to locate than the known, it's not impossible. As in "darkest Africa" in the 19th century, it helps to have a guide. And, when you find the "unknown" the payoff greatly exceeds that of working with the long known. Everybody else is doing that with what they learned from books. That was easy.

I suggest that some innovative, venture capital-rich corporation gather together a dozen of the youngest, smartest computer "hackers" in the country, pay them generously with a salary plus results option and turn them loose, with adequate technological equipment to find a thousand "unknowns" ... research far beyond anything universities are doing today. Instead of working inside square buildings developing into lawyers, real estate "flippers" and bureaucrats the chosen youth will likely become the "wealthgenerators" of tomorrow, working from where ever their computer nodes happen to be located.

There are at least 4,700 data bases available today. Within these pools of knowledge lies information that could create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. These data bases are not constant. They are growing exponentially, as new information feeds into them at the speed of light from around the world. The new jobs may be in the service or manufacturing industries, but more likely they would be in new knowledge industries that will replace tomorrow the auto, oil, hydro, manufacturing, lumber and mining industries of yesteryear.

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