What Now?

If anything, all these studies served to make me realize how little I knew about myself prior to this research.

I was still working as a software sales executive and staying on top of current technology. By now, there was no business system I could not understand. While in this function, a new way of developing systems was emerging - rule-based systems. Eureka! In addition, most large-scale companies had their employees connected to their mainframes with dumb terminals. This meant all employees could have access to the workload. If the rules could be written in a standardized fashion, any employee theoretically could perform any function. We could create a huge "job jar" that could be accessed by anyone who wanted to do more work. This could also serve as a fantastic training tool.

I had written a letter to Larry Wilson, the Counselor Selling maven. I stated in the letter that the course was a great help to me and that I had some ideas for improvement. While we talked on the phone I discovered he was trying to develop a "Corporate Brain" for the companies he was working with. I gave him some idea of how the job jar concept would work, so he invited me as his guest to his ranch in New Mexico. He had built the Pecos River Learning Center about a half hour north of Santa Fe to operate what was called "The Ropes Course," a three-day exercise to overcome stress and fear. Most attendees were corporate executives and professionals.

The ten thousand acre ranch in the mountains is nothing less than breathtaking. The mornings were clear and crisp. It was easy to see why so many artists come to New Mexico to paint. The light is sharp and distinct. Another beautiful starlit night occurred here like the one in France and the Gulf of Tonkin. It is a truly fantastic location and backdrop.

I participated in all the exercises and had a great time for the first two days. The third day was reserved for a kind of debriefing for the entire group and to discuss the experience from a personal point of view. Larry seldom ran the show, but this was one of those occasions. He is one entertaining individual. After the meeting, he came to me and wanted to find out more about what we had discussed on the phone, specifically how to improve his course. I explained my thoughts and he interrupted me soon after he understood and bolted upright. He called for his staff and gathered them into the room for me to explain to them what I had just said. Later in the book, we will develop the details.

Not long after this experience came another epiphany. While contemplating how we schedule our lives and prioritize our goals, a flash of insight caused me to realize that time is an invention of the ego. There is no such thing as yesterday or tomorrow. We project all ideas of past and future from NOW. We definitely gather experience to make decisions NOW about what our next action should be, but we are simply a Product of Our Past. We are not our past. Likewise, we create the future from NOW by using our imagination to consider thoughts and actions that would manifest into what we want to see THEN. But we only activate ourselves in the eternal NOW as we step into those thoughts and actions. We are creators and directors of our own dream sequence. It is as though each frame of a movie reel is stop action of our thoughts. NOW is the definition of Eternity.

My California epiphany was spatial in understanding all things are connected. We project our environment from the eternal HERE and we call it Infinity. My temporal side was now happy. My Corpus Callosum was finally in balance.

After this event, reading included people like Dr. Wayne Dyer and others like him. I was definitely on a Road Less Traveled. It turns out the road is called the Tao. After a couple of years of struggling with these ideas, the World Wide Web magically appeared. Like Al Gore, I'll take credit for creating it with my thoughts. Just kidding. Or, maybe not.

At this point, my work consisted primarily of consulting. I would contact companies to do an initial survey of their operations and, if they like what they saw and heard, I would gather other consultants to do the work proposed. One of these was Paul Tedesco.

Paul had begun programming a year after I had. He has a master's degree in Mathematics and is one of the best technicians I know. I had been studying Artificial Intelligence, as had he, and we hit it off right away. At the time, Roger Schank had come to Chicago from Princeton with a retinue of a couple of dozen minions to create learning systems for Ameritech. Roger had written "The Cognitive Computer" which I read and found to be lacking. What he described in the book dealt with the semantics of human language more than actually how to make a computer "think." I met him at a seminar and attempted to engage him in conversation about his book, but he pooh-poohed me away. So be it.

One day, Paul asked me to accompany him on a presentation he would make at Purdue University. He would present himself for the purpose of consulting and wanted to know what I thought. By this time, I had almost twenty years of software sales and presentations and he wanted a critique. Sure!

Paul's presentation was not very polished but very technical in nature. He was introducing his own "Slice and Dice" software and trying to describe how he would perform his consultation. I doubt anyone in the room understood what he said. But I did.

When we started the return trip, I realized that Paul had found a way to reverse the coding process so that the "Slice and Dice" module would work the same way as the human brain.

"Paul, what you have is an artificial mind!" I said.

"What do you mean?" he replied.

"What you said your product does is exactly what George Boole was trying to explain in his 'Calculus of Logic!' You have captured innate intelligence with zeroes and ones," I continued.

"I never thought of it that way," Paul retorts.

We discussed all the points required to make sure I wasn't mistaken and decided to rename the product Cogitator. Shortly after, we incorporated Cognitor, Inc. for the purpose of marketing this new idea. I even sent a letter to both Bill Clinton and Al Gore to get support. For the next two years, we struggled to get the company going. We hired a CEO and a CFO and found someone who actually understood the product. He had many connections that provided funding for us to build a staff of about twenty people. We were getting work, but not like anything I had imagined. Cogitator is raw intelligence and can be used in any environment, but only a small portion of its power was being put to use.

Emphasis shifted to building knowledge bases. Knowledge Management has just come into vogue and few people understood that concept. I divorced myself from the group in frustration after being left out of future planning.

The best use so far has been with the CTA Police in Chicago and The Medicare system. Paul replaced IBM in both organizations. We plan to stop between 25 and 50 billion dollars of fraud in the Medicare system.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Cogitator is the human ego in digital form. It uses binary zero to represent Space and one to represent time, just like we do. It is the Corpus Callosum of the computer. If used properly with knowledge bases, (which would represent our experiental memory and societal systems) there is no function it could not perform. We are already familiar with robots, smart phones, voice recognition, and the like. This is simply a smarter way of running society. The remainder of this book will describe how this intelligence can benefit everyone on the planet. This approach can work. The Internet is the key.

For people to get behind this or any other project, they must understand the purpose for this new system. They also must understand WHY they do what they do and how to get control over the ego. I will be referring back to the previous chapters often to make this more understandable and credible. It may not be palatable for some egos, but they eventually will comply. Stress comes from fighting truth and not many people enjoy being stressed. It will be a liberating exercise, I promise.

The whole idea for this book is to bring simplicity to complexity.