Peoples in intelligence era actually voting for their place's layer 3 AI Data Sovereignty not rival political parties. Updated chat October 2026 here - thanks to Japan from 1976 helping readers of The Economist foresee Entrepreneurial Revolution back in 1976 predicting AI most valuable transformation of 21st C intelligence worldGlobal brands emerged as language over last 30 years but LLMs making basic and costly mistakes failing subconcious codes. Ask for example chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk
Over 50 years ago at The Economist dad Norman debated main purposes of satellites - pity human intelligence has not done this. "Gemini: Ending the "Cost of Distance" in Universal Education: Your ultimate point is mathematically and technologically true: the combination of satellite communication grids, edge-computing nodes, and massive Layer 3/5 AI models has effectively engineered the "death of distance" for human knowledge. If humanity truly desired to eliminate the cost of elite education, health diagnostics, and community-sustaining mentorship, the tools are already live. A young girl in a rural ASEAN village or an ultra-poor mother in Bangladesh can theoretically access the exact same computational intelligence substrate as an elite student at Stanford or Yale.
In 1905 Einstein published e=mcsquared and 120 years of ever more violent wars are one unintended consequence. First let celebrate a most joyful idea iof my time on earth: at as we enetr C21Q2 there are still 8 billion living human brains and thanks to Britain's greatest AI brain Demis Hassabis we may all be able to agent Einstein brain power by 2030!
Join AIWHitehouse ...Minimum AI Brief to all teachers ;;Day 366 Trump2.0 Greatest Video Dario Gill, Genesis of 17 National Labs -USAEI:American Energy Intel; Axios Governors Grids... DC March 11 scsp .ai+education summit & ... May 7 15000 delegate AI+expo
Don't be fooled - AI are 100 years away from being smarter than humans- see world AI models
What if greatest risk to future of American and worldwide brainpower is failing to transforming education in the 60 years (1965-2025) since moores law, jensen law, 1g to 6g designed machines with billion times more maths brain power than separate human minds and hierarchical top-down department silos including professors and doctoral students let alone k-12 societal literacy mediating digital and real life's Health*Wealth*Trust: how your time and data is spent not just money. Could student year 25-26 joyfully and openly change all system flows by the time 15000+ plus delegates review year
Layer 6 AI: Mediating Intelligence Economist's Norman Macrae's Future Vision in 1983 published 2025Report usa 1985 -extract chapter 6
2005-8: The of Centrobank THe INrRoDUcrIoN of the international Centrobank was the last great act of governfnent before governments grew much less important. It was not a conception of policy-making governments at all, but emerged from the first computerized town meeting of the world. By 2005 the gap in income and expectations between the rich and poor nations was recognized to be man's most dangerous problem. The satellite TC system and two-way cable television channels in sixty-eight countries invited their viewers to participate in a computer conference about it, in the form of a series of weekly TC programs. Recommendations tapped in by viewers were to be tried out on a computer model of the world economy. If recommendations were shown by the model to be likely to make the world economic situation worse, they were lntroduction t sl l THE 2025 REPORT to be discarded. If recommendations were reported by the model to make the economic situation in poor couptries better, they were to be retained for "ongoing computer analysis" in the next program. In 2025 it is easy to see this as a forerunner of the TC conferences which play so large a part in our lives today, both as pastime and as the principal innovative device in business. But the truth about this 2005 breakthrough tends to irk the highbrows. It succeeded because it was initially a rather downmarket network television program. This is illustrated by the fact that the two gold-medal-winning telecommuters who were eventually acclaimed for contributing most to Centrobank's birth were Mr. S. C. Hu, the thoughtful and rich retired merchant of Taipeh in Taiwan, and Mr. Bjorn Heglund, the earnest young subpostmaster from the Kiruna district of north Sweden. Neither would conceivably have been consulted if a conference on the subject had been called mainly among the best-educated economists of 2005. About 400 million people watched the first program, and 3 million individuals or groups tapped in suggestions. Around 99 per cent of these were rejected by the computer as being likely to increase the unhappiness of mankind. It became known that these rejects included suggestions submitted by the World Council of Churches (whose "Charter 2006" was reported by the computer to be likely to increase unhappiness among 87 per cent of the population of the world) and by many other pressure groups. This still left 31,000 suggestions that were accepted by the computer model as worthy of ongoing analysis. As these were honed, and details were added to the most interestitg, an exciting consensus began to emerge. Later programs were watched by nearly a billion people as it became recognized that something important was being born. These audiences were swollen by successful telegimmicks. The presenter of the opening part of the first program was a roly-poly professor who was that year's Nobel laureate in economics, and who proved a natural television personality. He explained that economists now agreed that aid programs could 52 2005-8: The Introduction of Centrobank sometimes help poor countries, but sometimes most definitely made their circumstances worse. When Mexico was inflating at over 80 per cent a year in the early 1980s, the inflow to it of huge loanable funds made its inflation even faster and its crash more certain. The professor set Mexico's 1979-81 economy on the model, pumped in the loaned funds and showed how all the indicators (higher inflation, lower real gross domestic product, and so on) then flashed red, signalling an economy getting worse, rather than green, signalling an economy getting better. He followed this with similar examples from several other poor countries in Latin America and Africa during 1950-85. The professor then put the model back to mirror the contemporary world economy of 2005, and played into it various nostrums that had been recommended by politicians of left, right and center, but mostly left. The dials generally flashed red. Then the professor provided another set of recommendations, and asked any viewers who wished to play to tap in their own guesses for the consequent movements in twenty economic variables in the model. Those who got their guesses right to within a set error were told they had qualified for the second round of a knock-out economic guesstimators' world championship. Knock-out competitions of this sort continued for ordinary users of two-way TCs throughout the series of programs. In the second part of that first program the presenters dared to introduce two political problems into the game. They said that government-to-government aid programs had been particularly popular among politicians during the age of overgovernment, but there was growing agreement that government- to-government aid was the worst method of hand-out. The excessive role played by governments in many poor countries was one of the barriers to their economic advance, and a main destroyer of their people's freedom. Could anybody think it would have been wise to give aid to President Mbogo? In consequence, the most successful economic aid programs had been those operated through the International Monetary Fund, which imposed conditions on how borrowing governments should operate. The professor showed that IMF-moni- 53 THE 2025 REPORT tored operations in most years had brought more green flashes from the model than red, which few other sorts of schemes had done. But this involved IMF officials-often from the rich countries- in telling governments of poor countries what to do; and one of the objectives of the initiative called for by President Kennedy was precisely to diminish such embarrassments. The first questions to be asked in the next few programs, said the compilers, were (l) which countries should qualify for aid?; and, having decided that , (2) up to what limits and conditions?; and (3) through what mechanisms? They promised that later programs after the first half-dozen would examine how any scheme could be used to diminish the power of governments and increase the power of free markets and free people. The first stage of this computerized town meeting of the world went remarkably well. A consensus quickly emerged that poor countries which agreed to join a club with certain libertarian nrles (the principal ones were that markets instead of politicians should set prices; there should be fairly free trade, and fairly free immigration of people and businesses from countries richer than themselves; human rights cases should be referred to an international supreme court) could also have access to the benefits of a new international central bank called the "Centrobank." The Centrobank should be a body which relied very little on the discretion of its governor, but much more on a computer program. This program should authorize the Centrobank to print enough new foreign exchange called bancor for any applicant country below a certain income per head to allow its internal economic growth to proceed at the fastest possible noninflationary pace but not by one penny faster. The Centrobank's computer would monitor each recipient country's economy to see if inflationary or other strains were appearing, and would signal that Centrobank must cut off new supplies of artificially created foreign exchange if they did. Contemporary critics said in triple self-contradiction that (a) this scheme was so insulting to poor countries' governments 54 2005-8: The Introduction of Centrobonk that few would agree to join it; (b) all poor countries would flock to eat at this trough and there would be an impossibly inflationary expansion of world money supply; and that (c) the anti-inflationary terms proffered from the international central bank were so tough that this would still allow only painfully slow economic depauperization. Now that the Centrobank has been in operation for nearly twenty years we know that the answer to (a) is that the government of any poor country that does not join Centrobank is likely to be booted out by its people; that the answer to (b) is that, despite this flood of countries into the scheme, newly created foreign exchange for poor countries has in only one year,2Ol3, exceeded 0.2 per cent of world-wide money supply (WM3); and that the answer to (c) is that progress proved remarkably fast, although that was partly because of the answers that emerged to the second set of questions posed in the next few programs. The second set of questions which arose after about the eighth program rested on what sorts of purchases should qualify for Centrobank payments. Originally the notion had been that the international Centrobank should open foreign exchange clearing accounts to finance non-inflationary purchases by any persons or any groups in qualifying poor countries. The stated aim was that a poor country should not be prevented merely by shortage of foreign exchange from pursuing the fastest possible rate of non-inflationary economic growth. But under the remorseless logic of the computer a bias was soon introduced in favor of financing purchases by citizens in poor countries rather than purchases by their governments.It became clear that projects by cost-disregarding governments in poor countries led more quickly to inflation than projects undertaken either (a) by penny-pinching native entrepreneurs (who began to apPear out of the woodwork in some profusion and in extraordinary places); or (b) by competing multinational corporations on new sorts of performance contracts. If you ask your TCs today, "What were the main evil con- 55 THE 2025 REPORT sequences of the colonial and immediate post-colonial periods in the poor two-thirds of the world?" two of the top answers will be: "The fact that an entrepreneurial class could not emerge as an important political constituency until the introduction of Centrobank after 200 5 :' and "The fact that until Centrobank no mechanism except uncompetitive government was put in place to meet many of the most urgent demands of the poorest three-quarters of the peopl e." Centrobank's solution to the first of these problems owed much to the proposals from Mr. Hu; its solution to the second problem owed much to the proposals from Mr.Heglund. Start with why Mr. Hu's proposals for encouraging entrepreneurs were so important. Growth had taken place in Europe and Japan and North America after 1850 because an entrepreneurial commercial class had become a dominant political influence, replacing the aristocracies in Europe and Japan and the mhlange misdescribed by de Tocqueville in North America. In the immediate post-colonial period in the poor countries circa 1960-2005 power fell instead into the hands of a new class of professional politicians , dt a time when they could temporarily do damaging things inconceivable for professional politicians before or (thank God) since. Their most damaging act was to set "political" instead of market prices. By statutory decree in many poor countries exchange rates and urban wages had been kept too high, food prices to farmers and prices for public utilities kept too low, credit had been allocated by rationin g at negative real interest rates, and imports had been rationed by licences that were immensely profitable to the politicians' brothers-in-law who were corruptly granted them. Even in 2005 every single computer program showed that living standards were increased, inflation brought down, and huppiness and efticiency advanced, when these policies were abandoned. So did every practical example. Call up on your TCs the practical example of Taiwan in the second half of the twentieth century; analysis of its success was the basis for Mr. Hu's proposals for Centrobank. Taiwan in 56 ,N -; .I, tII 20054: The Introduction of Centrobank 1950-2000 had multiplied its real income twentyfold and its dollar exports four-hundredfold because in the 1950s an invading warlord and his soldiers had been impelled by odd circumstances into laissez-faire economic policies against their will; and because Taiwan had thereafter been kept dynamically entrepreneurial largely because of nasty protectionism by rich countries against its exports. When in 1948 the armies of General Chiang Kai-shek fled from the Chinese mainland to Taiw&r, swelling its population overnight, they found an island which relied for over 90 per cent of its exports on rice and sugar. These were two commodities whose sales could not be greatly increased on world markets by dropping their international price. It therefore seemed natural to the incoming soldiers to follow the mistaken policies adopted by so many other authoritarian governments in poor countries all through 1950-2005. For a while they exploited the farmers by keeping internal farm prices too low and Taiwan's international exchange rate artificially high. The soldiers also granted cheap credits to themselves to set up manufacturing businesses. The results of such folly were the usual ones: food production and exports fell; inflation soared to three-digit figures; and foreign exchange holdings collapsed despite huge American aid. The soldiers met this by restricting imports further to protect their infant industries and their disappearing exchange reserves; this sent inflation even higher. As sugar and rice production used up much land in the overcrowded island, real estate prices in particular went through the roof. This economic mess was sadly typical of many newly independent countries at the time, but Taiwan was lucky in being newly dependent instead. General Chiang Kai-shek was at this time entirely dependent politically on the Americans, and he unwillingly agreed to propitiate them by accepting their good advice. He moved in the late 1950s pretty abruptly from the then usual developing-country wrong policies (low prices to farmers; protected home market for manufactures but overvalued exchange rate; subsidized interest rates) to the unfash- 57 THE 2025 REPORT ionable and precisely opposite right policies (market prices for farmers and market-determined exchange rates and interest rates; trade liberalization). The results exceeded all expectations. With its market-determined exchange rate, Taiwan found that its cheap-labor exports of umbrellas et cetera expanded smoothly-until foreign umbrella-makers objected to Taiwan's penetration of their domestic markets; then Taiwan's expansion in that particular product would abmptly stop. So Taiwan grew through its industrial miracle of 1955-2005 knowing that its businesses must find new products for new markets all the time, and that last year's successful firm would often have to close down this year. In consequence of its recognition that bureaucrats cannot know what will be profitable next minute, Taiwan subsidized only one thing apart from its over-large army: its tax and social nonwelfare policies were directed to raising savings from 5 per cent of national income in the 1950s to a Japan-beating 25 per cent in the 1980s. Mr. Hu recommended that the policies furthered by Centrobank in poor countries should be those that had "been furthered by accident in my country, Taiwan:' and he suggested some of the relevant software by which the Centrobank's computer model could put these incentives into effect. He was rather too inclined to argue that "anybody who does not follow these policies should not get Centrobank aid," but the process of ongoing computer analysis synthesized most of this into the messag€, "If you are following Taiwan-type polici€s, then the computer will allow a much higher level of internal expansion before it flashes the signal that inflation is being fostered so that further Centrobank creation for you must stop." As the coordinating Nobel laureate said when presenting Mr. Hu with one of the two gold medals: His software provided one of the two quantum leaps that turned Centrobank into a success. Although the 1955-2005 Taiwan-type policies hugely expanded national income, the pressure groups in favor of them are entrepreneurs who do 58 2005J; The Introduction of Centrobank not come into being until the policies have already been introduced. In most poor countries that have been following the old and opposite policies of import substitution and pricerigging, the political constituencies in favor of the old policies are by definition more powerful. This is a main reason why these old-fashioned countries remain poor. In some Latin American countries right-wing generals have periodically seized power, and put into effect policies that are supposed to be laissez-faire. But these generals generally have to rely for their political mandate on the few old families who already own big businesses in these countries. Even with the best will in the world (which these right-wing generals rarely have) they tend therefore to support and protect yesterday's big capitalists, rather than the grubby entrepreneurs in back rooms on whom growth most depends. Mr. Hu's proposals managed to make Centrobank's computer programs mirror the dependence on entrepreneurs created by historical accident in the 1950-2005 success stories of Japan (which ploughed through yesterday's powerful families in 1945 and had to rely on entrepreneurs thereafter), Singapore (which benefited from not having any farmers or mral classes to exploit), Hong Kong (which did not have any political constituencies, only entrepreneurs) and Taiwan. Although Mr. Hu was rightly decorated for "enabling Centrobank policies to speak with a Taiwanese accent," the later stages of the first computerized town meeting of the world were carried on more like one of today's many million computer conferences than like the original television network program in which Mr. Hu joined. People after about program fourteen did not put in their views instantly, but after some days' consideration and after checking with the database which showed what was the presumed best form for Centrobank at the moment. The computer still rejected the 99 per cent of proposals made to it that were nonsense; it still incorporated for ongoing analysis the less than 1 per cent of suggestions that seemed sensible and relevant; but it also now introduced a new cate- 59 THE 2025 REPORT gory. It picked up those contrary views that seemed plausibly sensible, but not suitable for the emerging form of Centrobank's consensus, and put proposers of such ideas in touch with people holding similar views around the world. From the views of this constructive opposition to "Hu plus 33,I79 people's telecommunicated and accepted improvements," one new consensus objection began to emerge. "f,Jnder the Taiwanese system," wrote one objector, "the main incentive to entrepreneurs in poor countries is to produce for fairly rich consumers, abroad or at home. If most of the seventy to eighty countries in the Centrobank scheme started exporting cheap-labor umbrellas as Taiwan did in the 1950s , a glut of umbrellas would rather soon appear. It would be better if new entrepreneurs could be encouraged to provide more of the things desperately needed by the poorest three-quarters of the people in these poor lands." How to do this? It was no good saying that poor countries should follow more egalitarian tax policies so as to direct more of their internal demand to things needed by their own poorest people. In the United States in the second half of the twentieth century, marginal tax rates generally took around one half of earned incomes above about six times gross national product per head. Even this only managed to reduce Gini coefficients, the best measure of wealth inequality, from something like 0.39 to something like 0.34. In Africa in 2000 GNP per head was around $500 a year. Any egalitarian tax policy which promised to halve all incomes above $3,000 a year would have (a) killed all initiative; (b) stirred politicians' brothers-in-law, civil servants and-most important-army officers (who got over $3,000 a year) into instant coups d'€tat Moreover, ro mechanisms existed in these countries to provide cheaply the complicated services the very poor needed most urgently. This was the problem that benefited from the proposals of Bjorn Heglund, who had long urged that the public services needed in his native North Sweden should be provided competitively by private entrepreneurs on performance contracts, along the lines of experiments which had been tried in the 1990s 60 20054: The Introduction of Centrobank by various worthy Swedish international aid organizations which "adopted" certain Third World villages. As was said at the presentation of Heglund's gold medal: We at Centrobank began to realize that poor countries could best grow richer by selling simple cheap-labor goods to the rich world-a process that did not involve them in using our proffered foreign exchange at all, although it had become possible only after they responded to Centrobank's initial incentives d la "Hu plus 33,179." The right way to use their new foreign exchange was often to provide mechanisms d la Heglund whereby Western firms are encouraged to make money by providing the services that the poorest three-quarters in the poor world most need. The time was ripe for this experiment, especially in such fields as medicine. The trend even in the West at this time was to new sorts of Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs), through which people paid performance fees to physicians and their assistants if they kept them pnd their families healthy. It was early decided to put the competitive services provided by multinational HMOs into the pool which would qualify for Centrobank payments. Sophisticated computer measurements of people's health were coming into fashion, and three young doctors just out of medical school at the University of Minneapolis drew the largest single Centrobank payment in 2009 when their HMO, resting heavily on telecommunicated X-rays and long-range computer analyses, plus quickly trained local paramedics and some helicopter- carried Western doctors on call, plus recommended dietary changes and some environmental changes which new staffs personally put into effect (cleaning wells, etc.), brought an extraordinary improvement in the health indices of people over a wide stretch of Africa's desperately poor Sahel. Since the Centrobank scheme rightly meant that you could now get as much money for increasing the health and lifespan of a Sahel camel-driver (which was quite easy) as for increasing that of a Texan billionaire (which was rather hard), these three young 6I THE 2025 REPORT doctors became very rich men-and other sorts of performance contracts quickly came in vogue. This revolution in attitudes and

Monday, July 18, 2022

summary of likely futures of humanity to 2025 from 1984 if human emotional intel open & deep as nature

 from 2025report by macrae & macrae first published 1984 -tech scenarios first mapped 1982

Future History

Net Futures - The 2024 Report

Back in 1984 , Norman Macrae wrote "The 2024 Report: a future history of the next 40 years". It was the first book to:

  • provide readers with a brainstorming journey of what people in an internetworking world might do
  • predict that a new economy would emerge with revolutionary new productivity and social benefits enjoyed by all who interacted in a net-connected world

Our 1984 scenario of an internetworking world

Changing communications, and what makes people distant, bossy, etc

Changing national politics

Changing economics

Changing employment

Changing education


Our 1984 scenario of an internetworking world

The great technological event of the next 40 years will be the steady rise in importance of the Telecommunications-Computer terminal (TC for short)... Eventually books, files, television programmes, computer information and telecommunications will merge. We'll have this portable object which is a television screen with first a typewriter, later a voice activator attached. Afterwards it will be minaturised so that your personal access instrument can be carried in your buttonhole, but there will be these cheap terminals around everywhere, more widely than telephones of 1984. The terminals will be used to access databases anywhere in the globe, and will become the brainworker's mobile place of work. Brainworkers, which will increasingly mean all workers, will be able to live in Tahiti if they want to and telecommute daily to the New York or Tokyo or Hamburg office through which they work. In the satellite age costs of transmission will not depend mainly on distance. And knowledge once digitalised can be replicated for use anywhere almost instantly.

Over the last decade, I have written many articles in The Economist and delivered lectures in nearly 30 countries across the world saying the future should be much more rosy. This book explores the lovely future people could have if only all democrats made the right decisions.

Norman Macrae, 1984.


Changing communications, and what makes people distant, bossy etc

Telecommunications are now recognised as the third of the three great transport revolutions that have, in swift succession, transformed society in the past two hundred years. First, were the railways; second the automobile; and third, telecommunications-attached-to-the-computer, which was bound to be the most far-reaching because in telecommunications, once the infrastructure is installed, the cost of use does not depend greatly on distance. So by the early years of the twenty-first century brainworkers - which in rich countries already meant most workers - no longer need to live near their work.

All three revolutions were opposed by the ruling establishments of their time, and therefore emerged fastest where government was weak. All three brought great new freedoms to the common man, but the railway and motor-car ages temporarily made access to capital the most important source of economic power. As most men and women did not like being bossed about by capitalists who could become more powerful because they were born stinking rich, they voted to give greater economic power to governments during the railway and motor-car ages. This was economically inefficient, and also made tyrannies more likely and more terrible. The information revolution was fortunately the exact opposite of the steam engine's industrial revolution and of Henry Ford's mass production automobile revolution in this respect. The steam engine and mass production has made start-up costs for the individual entrepreneur larger and larger, so that in both the steam and automobile ages to quote Bell Canada's Gordon Thompson in the early 1970s, there was 'no way an ordinary citizen could walk into a modern complex factory and use its facilities to construct something useful for himself'. But, as Thompson forecast, the databases of the next decades were places into which every part-time enthusiast could tele-commute. In all jobs connected with the use of information, start-up costs for the individual entrepreneur in 1984-2024 have grown smaller and smaller. It was 'never thus', said Thompson, 'with power shovels and punch presses'.

In consequence, in the TC age, the most important economic resource is no longer ownership of or access to capital, but has become the ability to use readily available knowledge intelligently and entrepreneurially.

Changing national politics

For a region's people to succeed in the Telecommuting Age there are four main requirements - satisfied in places as far apart ad Guam and Queensland and Cape Province and California and Penang and Scotland. First , as the prophet John Naisbitt said in 1982, 'the languages needed for the immediate future are computer and English'. Second, the area has to be a nice one in which to live. Third, it is important that all income earners should adapt happily to a 'cafeteria of compensation' schemes. These allow the individual employee to decide what mix (s)he wants of salary, job objectives, career aims, flexitime, job sharing, long or short holidays, fringe benefits or fringe nuisances. Fourth, there needs to be a competitive and quickly changing telecommunications system. The TC age is making understanding of these requirements increasingly transparent among human beings worldwide.

Governments at first tried to impede or regulate much of this, but an early discovery of the Telecommutung age was that we could change the way we chose our governments. Until the 1990s we had pretended to ourselves that we could alter our lifestyles by choosing on each Tuesday or Thursday every four years whether Mr Reagan or Mr Carter , Mrs Thatcher or Mr Kinnock, was putting on the tribal demonstration which at that particular moment annoyed us less. After the advent of the TC we found that the more sensible and direct way in which a free man or woman could choose government was by voting with his or her feet. The individual could go to live in any area where the government - which could from then on be a very local government - permitted the lifestyle, rules and customs which suited that human being.

Changing Economics

The introduction of the international Centrobank was the last great act of government before government grew much less important. It was not a conception of policy-making governments at all, but emerged from the first computerised town meeting of the world.

By 2005 the gap in income and expectations between the rich and poor nations was recognised to be man's most dangerous problem. Internet linked television channels in sixty-eight countries invited their viewers to participate in a computerised conference about it, in the form of a series of weekly programmes. Recommendations tapped in by viewers were tried out on a computer model of the world economy. If recommendations were shown by the model to be likely to make the world economic situation worse, they were to be discarded. If recommendations were reported by the model to make the economic situation in poor countries better, they were retained for 'ongoing computer analysis' in the next programme.

In 2024 it is easy to see this as a forerunner of the TC conferences which play so large a part in our lives today, both as pastime and principal innovative device in business. But the truth of this 2005 breakthrough tends to irk the highbrow. It succeeded because it was initially a rather downmarket network television programme. About 400 million people watched the first programme, and 3 million individuals or groups tapped in suggestions. Around 99 per cent of these were rejected by the computer as likely to increase the unhappiness of mankind. It became known that the rejects included suggestions submitted by the World Council of Churches and by many other pressure groups. This still left 31,000 suggestions that were accepted by the computer as worthy of ongoing analysis. As these were honed, and details were added to the most interesting, an exciting consensus began to emerge. Later programmes were watched by nearly a billion people as it became recognised that something important was being born.

These audiences were swollen by successful telegimmicks. The presenter of the first part of the first programme was a roly-poly professor who was that year's Nobel laureate in economics, and who proved a natural television personality. He explained that economists now agreed that aid programmes could sometimes help poor countries, but sometimes most definitely made their circumstances worse. When Mexico was inflating at over 80 per cent a year in the early 1980s , the inflow to it of huge loanable funds made its inflation even faster and its crash more certain. The professor set Mexico's 1979-1981 economy on the model, pumped in the loaned funds and showed how all the indicators ( higher inflation, lower real gross domestic product and so on) then flashed red, signaling an economy getting worse, rather than green, signaling an economy getting better. ..The professor then put the model back to mirror the contemporary world of 2005, and played into it various nostrums that had been recommended by politicians of left, right and centre, but mostly left. The dials generally flashed red. Then the professor provided another set of recommendations , and asked viewers who wished to play to tap in their own guesses on the consequent movement of key economics variables in the model. Those who got their guesses right to within a set error were told they had qualified for a second round of a knock-out economic guesstimators' world championship. Knockout competitions of this sort continued for viewers throughout the series of programmes.

In the second part of that first programme, the presenters dared to introduce two political decisions into the game. They said that government-to-government aid programmes had been particularly popular among politicians during the age of over-government, but there was growing agreement that government-to-government aid was the worst method of hand-out. The excessive role played by governments in poor countries was one of the barriers to their economic advance, and a main destroyer of their people's freedom. Could anyone have thought it would be wise to give aid to President Mbogo?

In consequence, the most successful economic aid programmes had been those operated through the International Monetary Fund, which imposed conditions on how borrowing governments should operate. The professor showed that IMF-monitored operations in most years had brought more green flashes from the model than red. But this involved IMF officials - often from the rich countries - in telling governments of poor countries what to do; and one of the objectives of this town meeting of the world was to diminish such embarrassments.

The first questions to be asked in the next few programmes, said the compilers, were 1) which countries should qualify for aid? ; and having decided that, 2) up to what limits and conditions? ; and 3) through what mechanisms? They promised that later programmes after the first half-dozen would examine how any scheme could be used to diminish the power of governments and increase the power of free markets and free people.

Changing employment

In a typical 21st C scene, obedience to consumer needs is shown by every car plant in the world because of better and more customised information available on all our TCs. Most people buying a car in 2024 will key into their special requirements into their TCs.

The TC will reply: "You can get a customised car which meets all of your specifications by putting personalised instructions on the software of the assembly line's robots in one of these factories (choice of nine) requesting that the next car on the line be modified as you dictate. But that would cost up to $40,000 (Click to factories for quotations and credit facilities). For a fifth of that price, you can meet most of your requirements by the following standard computer programme at present scheduled for production in June at Nissan Kanpur; or July at Ford Manila (and so on). Click to factories for precise specifications and prices.

All of this has become commonplace after 2000. How has it affected employment?

For a new industry of 2019-2024 let us cite the intendedly short-lived example of the Clark-Schmidt Robot Gardener. Matthew Clark was a 53-year old on his third university course (he had started the other two at the ages of nineteen and thirty-seven respectively) telecommuted through the University of Southern California, although he took it while living in his native Australia , when, together with two other student's telecommuting through USC's database, he devised a system for a robot-driven lawnmower which could also scan soil and assess the possibilities for reseeding. It signaled the videos to be called up on your TC to show alternative uses for the soil in your garden. If you picked one video display that particularly suited your taste, you keyed in its number into the Robot Gardener and it signaled back, 'put such-and-such chemical into my tank and seeds 1234, 3456 (et cetera), plus software program 29387 - both orderable through your TC - into my reseeder.'

Clark and his two colleagues put their tentative ideas for this device on the researchers' database monitored by the University of Southern California. The entry numbers to the USC database were held by people who had promised to accept the computer's judgement of the value of any ideas they might contribute to projects entered on it. In all, 1213 people - domiciled from Hanoi through Penang and Capri and Bermuda back to Queensland in Australia itself - tapped in suggestions for improvements, of which 176 were accepted nby the computer as worthwhile. The payments recommended by the computer ranged from $42 ( for a cosmetic improvement recommended by an eleven-year-old schoolboy) to one tenth of the equity (eventually worth several million dollars) for a proposal by a research team from another telecommuting university which proved important enough for Clark to feel slightly guilty about calling the Robot Gardener after himself.

When the improvements suggested by these 176 contributors had been incorporated by Clark into the appropriate software program for making the Robot Gardener , it was advertised on USC's entrepreneur-browsing program available on any TC. Entry numbers for the lowest echelons of this can be bought for a very few dollars, but the Robot Gardener was put on a higher echelon because USC's computer had signaled this was a potential quick winner.

One of those who had paid for an expensive entry number into browsing among good 'proffered opportunity products' (POPs) was a Dutchman called Carl Schmidt. He had become a successful 'arranging producer' in an earlier venture, and now occupied himself browsing through his TC looking for a second bonanza. He made an offer to Clark to tale an option for launch in return for a fairly complicates programme of profit sharing, which in practice (because arranging is nowadays a more skilled job than inventing) eventually gave Schmidt more money than Clark. Clark accepted this and Schmidt produced a prototype within three days by reprogramming robots in an experimental plant. A video of the prototype was put on consumers' TC channels worldwide the next week, and most of the 400 odd gardeners' TC channels round the world picked it out within days as a 'best buy'.

Schmidt's video advertisement said 'If you key in your order now with your credit number, you can get a Robot Gardener for a bargain price (applies to the first 10,000 orders only). Tenders are also invited for part of the equity.' The advance orders and bids for equity made it possible to finance assembly of the Robot Gardener for early-bid customers within a few weeks...

Note that there was never any intention that Robot Gardeners Inc should grow into a huge and long-lasting company. Clark and Schmidt are already researching and browsing into other possibilities, on separate courses. About fifty of those who succeeded by early participation in this venture hope to become the equivalent of Clark and Schmidt in other things.

At no stage has this enormously successful manufacturing venture employed more than 1000 people. It is therefore true that the loss of nine-tenths of manufacturing jobs , which we saw has been highest in car-making in rich countries, has also been true there in manufacturing jobs as a whole. Where these countries had 20-40 per cent of their workforces in manufacturing in 1974, they typically have 2-4 per cent now.

This is not an unprecedented rundown. In the 1890s around half of the workforce in countries like the United States were in three occupations: agriculture, domestic service and jobs to do with horse transport. By the 1970s these three were down to 4 per cent of the workforce. If this had been foretold in the 1890s, there would have been a wail. It would have been said that half the population was fit only to be farmworkers, parlourmaids and sweepers-up of horse manure. Where would this half find jobs? The answer was by the 1970s the majority of them were much more fully employed ( because more married women joined the workforce) doing jobs that would have sounded double-Dutch in the 1890s: extracting oil instead of fish out of the North Sea; working as computer programmers, or as television engineers, or as package-holiday tour operators chartering jet aircraft.

The move in jobs in the past fifty years in the rich countries has been out of manufacturing and into telecommuting.

Changing education

There has been a sea-change in the traditional ages on man. Compared with 1974 our children in 2024 generally go out to paid work (especially computer programming work) much earlier, maybe starting at nine, maybe at twelve, and we do not exploit them. But young adults of twenty-three to forty-five stay at home to play much more than in 1974; it is quite usual today for one parent (probably now generally the father, although sometimes the mother) to stay at home during the period when young children are growing up. And today adults of forty-three to ninety-three go back to school - via computerised learning - much more than they did in 1974.

In most of the rich countries in 2024 children are not allowed to leave school until they pass their Preliminary Exam. About 5 per cent of American children passed their exam last year before their eight birthday, but the median age for passing it in 2024 is ten-and-a-half, and remedial education is generally needed if a child has not passed it by the age of fifteen.

A child who passes his Prelim can decide whether to tale a job at once, and take up the remainder of his twelve years of free schooling later; or he can pass on to secondary schooling forthwith, and start to study for his Higher Diploma.

The mode of learning for the under-twelves is nowadays generally computer-generated. The child sits at home or with a group of friends or (more rarely) in an actual, traditional school building. She or he will be in touch with a computer program that has discovered , during a preliminary assessment, her or his individual learning pattern. The computer will decide what next questions to ask or task to set after each response from each child.

A school teacher assessor, who may live half a world away, will generally have been hired, via the voucher system by the family for each individual child. A good assessor will probably have vouchers to monitor the progress of twenty-five individual children, although some parents prefer to employ groups of assessors - one following the child's progress in emotional balance, one in mathematics, one in civilized living, and so on - and these groups band together in telecommuting schools.

Many communities and districts also have on-the-spot 'uncles' and 'aunts'. They monitor childrens' educational performance by browsing through the TC and also run play groups where they meet and get to know the children personally...

Some of the parents who have temporarily opted out of employment to be a family educator also put up material on the TC s for other parents to consult. Sometimes the advice is given for free, sometimes as a business. It is a business for Joshua Ginsberg. He puts a parents advice newsletter on the TC , usually monthly. Over 300,000 people subscribe to it, nowadays at a 25-cent fee per person, or less if you accept attached advertisements. Here's an entry from the current newsletter:

"Now that TCs are universal and can access libraries of books, 3-d video, computer programs, you name it, it is clear that the tasks of both the Educator and the Communicator are far more stimulating that ten years ago.

One of my recent lessons with my ten-year-old daughter Julie was in art appreciation. In the standard art appreciation course the TC shows replicas of famous artists' pictures, and a computer asks the pupil to match the artist to the picture. Julie said to the computer that it would be fun to see Constable's Haywain as Picasso might have drawn it. The computer obliged with its interpretation , and then ten more stylised haywains appeared together with the question 'who might have drawn these?'. I believe we are the first to have prompted the TC along this road, but it may now become a standard question when the computer recognises a child with similar learning patterns to Julie's.

It is sometimes said that today's isolated sort of teaching has robbed children of the capacity to play and interact with other children. This is nonsense. We ensure that Julie and her four year old brother Pharon have lots of time to play with children in our neighbourhood . But in work we do prefer to interact with children who are of mutual advantage to Julie and to each other. The computer is an ace teacher, but so are people. You really learn things if you can teach them to someone else. Our computer has helped us to find a group of four including Julie with common interests, who each have expertise in some particular areas to teach the others.

The TC also makes it easier to play games within the family. My parents used to play draughts, halma, then chess with me. They used to try to be nice to me and let me win. This condescending kindness humiliated me, and I always worked frenetically to beat my younger brother (who therefore always lost and dissolved into tears.) Today Julie, Pharon and I play halma together against the graded computer, and Julie and I play it at chess. The computer knows Pharon's standard of play at halma and Julie's and mine at chess. Its default setting is at that level where each of us can win but only if we play at our best. Thus Pharon sometimes wins his halma game while Julie and I are simultaneously losing our chess game, and this rightly gives Pharon a feeling of achievement. When Julie and I have lost at chess, we usually ask the computer to re-rerun the game, stopping at out nmistakes and giving a commentary. As it is a friendly computer it does a marvelous job of consoling us. Last week it told Julie that the world champion actually once made the same mistake as she had done - would she like to see that game?

I intend to devote the next two letters to the subjects I have discussed here , but retailing the best of your suggestions instead of droning on with mine."

While the computer's role in children's education is mainly that of instructor (discovering a child's learning pattern and responding to it) and learning group matcher, its main role in higher education is as a store of knowledge. Although a computer can only know what Man has taught it, it has this huge advantage. No individual man lives or studies long enough to imbibe within himself all the skills and resources that are the product of the millennia of man's quest for knowledge, all the riches and details from man's inheritance of learning passed on from generation to generation. But any computer today can inherit and call up instantly any skill which exists anywhere in the form of a program.

This is why automatically updated databases are today the principal instruments of higher education and academic research. It is difficult for our generation to conceive that only forty years ago our scientists acted as tortoise-like discoverers of knowledge, confined to small and jealous cliques with random and restricted methods of communicating ideas. Down until the 1980s the world has several hundred sepaate cancer research organisations with no central co-ordinating database.

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