Automated Innovation Revolution Key to Rebuilding, Advancing U.S. Economy (Issue #479)

To rebuild America’s competitiveness, it was obvious from the vantage point of the Socrates intelligence project, established by Michael C. Sekora during Reagan’s second term that America had to re-introduce technology-based planning as the foundation for decision-making. On the other hand, the U.S. could not simply revert to or adopt the same level of technology-based planning U.S. decision-makers had before World War II in industry or the public sector. In order to regain economic health and sustain economic superpower status, U.S. decision-makers needed to execute a level of technology-based planning designed in the Information Age and surpassing that being executed in China, India and elsewhere.




To borrow terminology from our World War II Pacific strategy, what the US needed to do was to leap-frog the technology-based or “tech-based” planning of those other countries. Part of the arduous analysis required in order to do this entailed the Socrates team mapping out the evolution of tech-based planning literally since the dawn of mankind. In so doing, two more things became obvious. First, tech-based planning (and mankind itself) makes an evolutionary leap forward every few hundred years—for example, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and so on. Second, mankind appeared altogether poised to make the next big evolutionary leap forward with tech-based planning, what Sekora referred to as the automated innovation revolution.



In the automated innovation revolution, the entire process for acquiring and utilizing technology (research and development, tech-alliances, etc.) is standardized and automated. The result is that the acquisition and utilization of technology can be executed with previously unimaginable speed, efficiency and agility—producing an endless, rapid stream of products and services based on technology breakthroughs that are automatically generated and utilized at amazingly fast rates. Resources become unified spontaneously through the application of usable information.



The Socrates team saw that if the U.S. was to generate and lead the automated innovation revolution, it would ensure America’s competitiveness and economic health for many future generations. The Socrates team designed, built and demonstrated a proof-of-principle version of the automated innovation system. The Socrates Project’s automated innovation system would generate another major benefit for the U.S., in that, it enabled public and private organizations throughout the U.S. to work together in a self-determined, highly symbiotic fashion—the result being that technology and the full range of various resources throughout the U.S. might be utilized in a highly coherent but flexible and independent fashion, increasing the competitive advantage of the U.S. and its private and public organizations, and still be fully compatible with democratic-republican principles and the free enterprise system.



A briefing was prepared and shown to President Reagan and his key advisors, which demonstrated conclusively both the threat posed by China’s and India’s tech-based planning approach, as well as the unprecedented, long-term competitive advantage the U.S. would be able to capture by generating and leading the automated innovation revolution. A relatively straightforward deployment of interface terminals to access the world’s technology information using advanced artificial intelligence software and all source intelligence data, would enable symbiotic relationships between U.S. public and private organizations to develop. A quick consensus emerged in the Reagan Administration that the full Socrates automated innovation system should be built and installed at a separate and independent government agency to support U.S. industry and a few government agencies with a valid need for the information.



President Reagan viewed “Socrates” as an innovative and prudential step for the United States to take for practical and self-interested reasons, given some grim long-term economic predictors. He also averred with the Socrates team that it would probably lead mankind into its next evolutionary step and that it was far better for the United States to set terms and parameters in this step rather than, say, China. Indeed, deployment of an automated innovation system would address the pressing economic challenges posed by China and India and the ever increasing likelihood that America would find herself displaced as the world’s premier economic powerhouse. At the same time and just as importantly, if the system were implemented deliberately for access by multiple users and using objective protocols with the proper oversight mechanism, the system would amount to having a brand new and powerful tool for superior performance with virtually no down side—the caveat for deployment being, that it must remain true to cherished American principles of private property, individual initiative, limited government and free markets.



Unfortunately before the draft executive order could be finalized and signed by President Reagan, his second term came to an end. By that time moreover, Reagan had personal health issues to attend to, albeit he did leave with full confidence that his vice-president and incoming president, George H.W. Bush would continue with “Socrates” to complete his impressive economic legacy. When Bush came into office, however, he abolished the Socrates Project in deference to Japanese demands; to reap a so-called post-Cold War “peace dividend”; and to usher in his own idealized “new world order” policy of unabashed globalism—without the same priority being given to parochial or exclusive U.S. economic interests.



Today with the U.S. having lost industry after industry overseas, and Americans’ standard of living in rapid decline, it is past time to complete the task that President Reagan charted. A legislatively authorized Socrates-like project would be a fitting tribute to the man whose 100th birthday anniversary we celebrate in February 2011. More critically, the automated innovation system is a necessary key to America’s economic wellbeing moving forward in the Information Age, against cutthroat market and currency manipulations being waged by authoritarian regimes and aggressive, culturally competing nation-states. The U.S. must generate and lead the automated innovation revolution, but while it is still possible to do so, the time is also far spent in terms of America’s economic eclipse. We must therefore move quickly and with resolution to do it, before it is too late and unsettling downward trends become irreversible.