On Topic: A little knowledge ...

I learned how to drive a stick shift when I was living in a small town in central Ohio, in the foothills of what's left of the Appalachian Mountains.

Not the White Cliffs of Dover, but still a fair number of precipitous drop offs. There were seriously steep hills where, if you didn't engage that clutch and depress the accelerator quickly enough to pull ahead from the stop sign, you could find yourself rolling backward - into the front of the car waiting behind you or, worse, straight into the Muskingum River.

At one stage I asked the friend who was teaching me what would happen if I didn't press down on the clutch. By now clearly having had enough of this teacher-precocious-student relationship, she turned to me and said, slowly, “It will blow up.”

About a decade later, a co-worker was demonstrating a new-to-me design software program. She was wrapping up what apparently for her had been a long, long session, and added: “Always remember to close down each window when you're done.”

“What will happen if I don't?” I asked innocently.

She turned to me and said, slowly, “It will blow up.”

Aside from the remote possibility that I might tend, on occasion, to ask more questions than some might want to bother entertaining, these sorts of incidents have made me wonder: When did machinery get so complicated we can't explain it? Or, to put it another way, when did it get so far in front of us?

I recall my maternal grandfather instinctively could fix anything. His job at the steel mill was to show up each day with his toolbox, then go wherever he was sent - to repair whatever might have stopped working, even if he'd never seen the thing before in his life.

He used to warn me the sad day would come when no one repaired anything. You'd take in your broken car or appliance and - instead of the malfunctioning part being examined and then made whole - it'd be tossed and replaced.

That day, for the most part, has arrived.

A couple years ago I spoke with Raymond Kurzweil, the futurist, inventor and author. He's the guy who believes that, by the year 2015, machines will be as smart as human beings.

Kurzweil refers to this event as the Singularity.

I asked him if maybe machines weren't already smarter than we are. I mean, how would we know?

He didn't answer my question. It's possible he thought I was kidding.

But we should consider the deep faith we place in machines, and keep doing our own thinking.

We exist now in what management expert Peter Drucker referred to as the knowledge-based economy, and that might be how we keep a leg up on the mechanical devices Ray Kurzweil predicts are closing in, intellect-wise.

The knowledge-based economy - knowledge is not the product but the tool we use - means a number of things. It means valued workers, you and me, will have to up our skill set.

We will need to be accomplished in how to track down information, how to interpret what we find, and then be able to communicate that data.

Benjamin Franklin is heralded as the last of the Renaissance Men. While it's probably not true that he “discovered” electricity by standing in a lightning storm with a kite and a metal key, he is touted as the last person standing who knew just about everything about, well, everything.

But the primary thing about the knowledge-based economy is that there really can't be any more Renaissance Men or Women.  There is simply too much to know today, and information continues to expand in myriad fields - we uncover more, we invent more, we interpret it differently.

Which brings us to the value of teams. (Quick team joke: There is no “I” in “team,” but there is a “me” if you switch around a few letters.)

Elaine Woods, head of the Northwest Michigan Council of Governments, in a brief discussion about the knowledge-based economy on YouTube, notes that “technology infuses everything.” (See this week's Data Source for more on this.)

Given the rapid evolution of that technology - “We're right in the middle of that transition right now,” she cautions - we must learn to work in teams.

In other words, as no one person can know everything, we need to pull together. Not just add more meetings onto our agenda, but actually cooperate on achieving our objectives.

We need to get comfortable with the notion of all of us getting on the same bus. Just the other day I had an error message pop up on my computer screen that said it was “refusing” - that's a quote, “refusing” - to carry out the task I'd requested.

Who knows - next, it just might blow up.