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Nations and businesses prosper by distributing power broadly to their citizens and employees; but long term survival depends on governance that conitinually blocks power consolidation in rules & procedures or in the hands of elite government or private or military inidividuals.

There is an ebb and flow, a rise and fall, to economic fortune. In the early stages of nation building or new business creation, a minimum of rules & procedures, laws & ordances are available to guide people. Nonetheless, citizens and employees fill in actions required to successfully accomplish the needs of the organization. Over time, procedures & rules & laws are put in place that increase efficiency but reduce individual descretion & creativity. Simultaneously power migrates to a minority of individuals. This process of "power codification and consolidation" is universal and timeless. Rich get richer, powerful become more powerful, and laws become more invasive. At some point, this brings and end to growth. It leads to the decline of the nation or business as the number of individual human beings with the resources and authority to be creative is reduced. Thus we see the rise and fall of empires and fortunes in endless cycles throughout recorded history.

In modern times, economic fortune has been driven increasingly by technology advances & entrepreneurs taking advantage of an increasingly richly connected world wide ecosystem. While the old rules of power consolidation still apply, they are acted out on an entirely new stage the world has never seen before.

On this new stage, commercial ecosystem learning, supply chain self-optimization, and larning organizations are emerging as economic forces that nust be considered in forming government policies and business management practices.

In all the history of mankind, nothing compares to the current worldwide explosion of knowledge and economic growth. While it is human creativity that is unleashing the modern economic miracle, it is new communication technologies that increasingly amplifying creativity and driving economic growth. And the centerpiece of communication is the Web.

The power of the Web itself is expanding exponentially in two dimensions: 1) content and 2) methods of access. The Web will soon possess all human knowledge of any consequence and it will become linguistic.

Within the next few decades, we will be able to hold conversations with the Internet about any topic within the scope of human knowledge, because the Internet will have all knowledge, and it will be able to understand the intent of typed and spoken queries.

With current costs for digitization and storage, for less than $10 billion we could add all human knowledge not already on the Web to the Web. That is to say, we could digitize all books, all movies, all music, all videos, all computer code and place them on the Web for less than $10 billion. We could then make all of it searchable with Internet search engines such as Google.

In fact, Google is already undertaking monumental steps in this direction by putting the Library of Congress online along with several major University libraries. This accretion of knowledge will certainly happen. So the Internet, in this sense, will be able to provide access to all human knowledge. (Some aspects will take more time to because of the broken US copyright laws that were put in place in the 1970s before the Internet revolution. see Larry Lessig.)

While natural language understanding technology, needed for conversation, is not here yet on the Internet, it certainly will be. It will be added to Google's input query window. Already text queries with natural language phrases are beginning to produce reasonable results. Soon we will be able to add spoken language input so you will be able to hold verbal conversations on cell phones as well.

We will be able to ask this "superhuman intelligence" questions that clearly exceed the capacity of any single human mind. And it will do more than simply regurgitate facts. It will learn what we normally think of as wisdom. It will do this by learning what "wisdom of crowds" has to say about any topic. Beginnings of this are already found in Web 2.0.

The Web will make this superhuman intelligence available to all humans on earth. This will happen not by decree of any government or investment from any company, but rather because of economic pressure.

The prospect of creating superhuman intelligence is amazing enough, but the more amazing aspect of the story, I think, is that superhuman intelligence will have arrived without human supervision. That is to say, there is no single human being who has a master plan that guides the evolution of the Web or intelligence in the Web. Yet, as if guided by a hidden hand, workers around the world with no knowledge of what the others are doing, are adding building blocks that work together to produce extraordinary intelligence. One day soon it will be widely acknowledge as "superhuman". This process works because the same forces so impressed Adam Smith are still operative, still guiding economic development, guiding the development of the Internet, ....and guiding the emergence of superhuman intelligence.... because it's good for economic growth.

The following essays and talks will show how economic development are aided by power-sharing. We will pay special attention to those aspects that we can consciously manage: systems of political and business governance that give rise to prosperity.

In conclusion, the focus of this website is not the Internet but rather the impact of the redistribution of power within businesses and economic systems. We focus on systems of governance that can take advantage of knowledge sharing. We mention the accelerating Internet because it is behind the acceleration of knowledge sharing and redistribution of power.

The purpose of this Web site is to explore governmental policies and systems of corporate governance that promote economic growth & prosperity.

While the focus is on general principles, examples are given that are relevant to day-to-day business operation and practical political issues.

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