ELIMINATING A BASIC ROADBLOCK TO ACCEPTANCE OF NEW VALUABLE
TECHNOLOGIES
                                                       950108
Conceptual authors: James E. D. Cline and Ken Vergini.
Here is a fundamental change needed to restore this nation's potential
technological competancy in the world marketplace:

There is a need for a governmental-like function to buffer widespread
effects of new technologies, so as to enable everybody to "win",
especially including those involved in the potentially displaced
technologies.

The benefits to Americans possible with new technologies could be
greatly accellerated through a means of deliberately integrating a prospective new technology into the existing entire scenario of the
country, compensating and re-training those who would be displaced by
the effects of the new technology.

The problem: An existing operational technological system provides the
livlihood of those providing its functions. These people stand to lose
much in the implementation of a new superior technological system
which obsoletes their livlihoods, and it tends to be human nature for
these interests to act to block the rival technology. And if the new technology does finally get widespread adoption, those displaced
people do lose much in their livlihood, also a waste.

As a hypothetical example, consider the possibility of a new
technology being able to provide very efficient transportation
throughout a widespread city such as Los Angleles and its suburbs, a
tchnology which would provide door-to-door commutes with
passenger+possessions security, without requiring purchase of
significant amounts of foreign crude oil to power the new
transportation system. While such a system would have major impact on improving balance of trade, reducing the national debt (some $80
billion lost to burning foreign crude oil each year), and could
improve the quality of commuting throughout the widespread suburbia.

However, there is a vast infrastructure dependent on keeping the
existing transportation system intact.

The corporations which build the cars, with their engineers,
management, subcontractors, blue collar workers, stockholders.
Automobile dealers, salesmen, servicemen. Road and freeway structural maintenance workers and suppliers, planned construction corporate
structure. Gasoline filling stations, workers, fuel shipmment
equipment and drivers, refineries, tankers, worldwide crude oil
suppliers. Automotive repair shops, parts warehouses and stores. The
DMV. The vast automotive insurance system's employees and
stockholders. The mortuary system that handles the 50,000 lives that
were lost each year nationwide to automobile accidents. The systems
which provide immediate response to accidents, clearing the roadways so that traffic can resume. The highway patrol which polices the
highways. The driver training investment that every driver has made,
and the familiarity of an established commute routine of most of the
inhabitants of the area. All would suffer employment losses if the
established system were to be quickly supplanted.

Such a vast and diverse group of people tend to resist that which
threatens to displace them, thus threatening their ability to make house payments, buy grocieries, send the kids through college. Very
unwelcome. Their dissaproval, passive and active resistance, works to
block the technology which would solve the widespread severe problems
of resource depletion and national debt, while providing more
satisfactory comuting for millions daily.

Proposed solution: The intelligent and compassionate re-training,
conversion of obsoleted facilities, as an integral part of the
adoption of the new technological system. A separate governing agency would be needed to achieve this, since the process of competitive
economics does not include this function.

The goal of this agency would be to find ways for everybody to win,
everybody: the vast group of consumers who benefit by the improved
standard of living enabled by the new technology, the providers of the
new technology, and also those displaced by the new technology.
Everybody needs to win.

Even the foreign suppliers of crude oil could win, as this governing
agency would have the responsibility to discover ways for all concerned to win. For example, the agency might determine that the
microbes which digest crude oil, first discovered unwelcome in WWII
aircraft fuel tanks producing sludge, and developed since then to
produce cattle feed out of crude oil at a high efficiency rate, would
allow the deserts of the mideastern countries to provide animal feed
such as cattle in feedlots, producing massive ammounts of food for the
world ... or some other more acceptable food system designed by them, based on a vast new nutritional source base for the food chain which
can be derived from microbial conversion of crude oil into animal
feedstock.

Thus the governing agency would have the responsibility for clearing
the way for the acceptance of the new transportation system
technology, easing its implementation for the vastly greater benefit
of the country, while converting and absorbing those from the
displaced technological system.

And new transportation technology ... for example, past each home
could travel a moving steel ribbon, from pulley to pulley, one around each block. The personal lightweight essentially unpowered wheeled
vehicle would move out from the home's garage, latch onto the moving
steel ribbon, whisk down the block ... to the next block's ribbon ...
eventually to higher speed ribbons pulling the wheeled vehicle down a
pre-programmed sequence of ribbon changes, to the destination. Further
destinations might involve being pulled so fast by very high speed
circulating ribbons that the vehicle starts to airsled along slippery  guideways ... faster than a car could go. And at the destination, say
the office, the vehicles are so light weight and small, they can be
pulled up and around multistory suitably designed buildings, parked on
the floor on which they work.

Is a moderating governing agency needed, in the competitive economical
system? Well, the above example of an outrageous concept for suburbia
commute, in reality seemed to have been considered enough of a threat
that all copies of the correspondence about it to a major automotive research corporation, everything written about it in the independent
amateur inventor's home files, dissappeared very expertly a few weeks
after an outline of the concept was sent to the automotive research
corporation in hopes of getting their support. The corporation did not
even acknowledge receipt of the proposal outline. A high integrity
agency to govern the integration of new potentially valuable
technologies could both protect fragile fledging technologies from being suppressed from whatever source, as well as provide confidence
that existing technological based industrial infrastructures, such as
the existing automobile commute system, would not collapse leaving
thousands unemployed and corporations bankrupt. Instead, an integral
part of implementation of a new technology would be the provision for
conversion and re-training of the displaced people and facilities, and
stockholder appropriate support.

Thus: a new governmental-like function to buffer widespread effects of new technologies, so as to enable everybody to "win".
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