The World Needs A Knowledge Inventory
Amazon has an inventory of every single item that they sell — from the manufacturer to your doorstep — and they nurture that inventory with intensity. So, why is there no comprehensive knowledge inventory of what people know and what they can produce? The Ingenesist Project is developing The Innovation Bank with the purpose of capitalizing knowledge assets across diverse communities.
Human productivity is the cornerstone of an economy. The consumption of products is a very poor measure of an economy — but that seems to be the best we can do. How many electrical engineers live in zip code 98020? No answer. How many packages of dog food are delivered to zip code 98020? Amazon knows. How many environmental scientists in zip code 06776? No clue. How many cordless phone chargers in 79938? Amazon knows. And this is only the real basic stuff.
Obviously, it would be highly invasive if the government or a large corporation were to catalog the knowledge for each and every person. History shows that any centralized repository of such information has the potential to be abused in any number of ways. But what if the Knowledge Inventory were decentralized? Do we actually need to know the names and identities of all the electrical engineers located in zip code 98020? For most business intelligence applications, the answer is no, you do not. Only when the deal is done would either party need to know the identities of the other. We call this AUPOT or Anonymity Until Point of Transaction.
If a company is planning to locate a manufacturing plant to an area, they only need to know if local staffing can be supported. If a company is selling computer hardware or specialized electronic tools, they only need to know what and how much to stock. If a new technology appears, they only need to predict future innovation flows. If a municipality is building a school, they only need to know how to allocate curricula. They don’t need to know our names, addresses or political affiliations. There should be no problem in curating a Knowledge Inventory.
I ask again, why don’t we have a comprehensive knowledge inventory?
The problem is that human knowledge is sequestered within the institutions that employ them. Corporations clearly have a vested interest in keeping this information close — and for very good reasons. Human capital is the only capital that really matters. The community knowledge inventory is masked by job codes, jurisdiction, college degree, NAICS codes, licensure, and many more artificial barriers that have nothing to do with the indisputable laws of Nature. For example, an engineer from Boeing could not easily get a job in the construction industry because job codes are different — even though airplanes and buildings have more in common than not.
The irony is that a corporation would not be hurt or damaged in any permanent way if the STEM professions were decentralized. Even with no identity attached, the resulting curation could only increase the efficiency of knowledge asset allocation internally and externally.
Decentralized Knowledge Assets
STEM professionals would share a common ontology indexed to the physical laws of nature, rather than the products that they consume. The resulting diversity of experience would greatly amplify creativity, innovation, business intelligence, and production yield. STEM professionals would be incentivized to pursue their natural interests and proclivities rather than follow the carrot and stick of a scripted career path. People would think bigger and look further act smarter and be happier if they are rewarded for following their passions.
One important benefit to anonymity is that other irrelevant data such as gender, age, race, lifestyle or past job titles could also be excluded just as easily as ID. This would reduce moral hazard, irrelevant data, prejudice, and many of the social ills that hinder career advancement. The efficiency of the hiring and retention process will increase substantially with the elimination of this social and financial overhead.
How does TIP solve this problem?
The Innovation Bank uses game theory, blockchain, and actuarial math to produce a decentralized knowledge inventory at scale. The Innovation Bank incentivizes STEM professionals to curate and validate their knowledge assets in a transaction record that they control — like a digital CV. There is no incentive to cheat. Third party entrepreneurs, corporations, and institutions may purchase access to metadata for business intelligence analyzing vectors and velocities of dynamic knowledge assets behaving organically. A market is then formed between supply and demand which can be amplified by machine learning and overlaid to existing ontologies. A cryptographic token keeps score. The Innovation Bank is an extremely simple way to accomplish the immensely complex needs of our future citizens. Let’s start now.
