From the Village Brain to the Knowledge Industrial Revolution

My intellectual journey into the Economics of Knowledge did not begin in a university laboratory, a corporate research centre or a policy institution. It began in a backward region of Kerala in 1970.

I had started my career as a college lecturer in economics. Despite the limitations of their schooling and social environment, many of my students possessed remarkable intellectual calibre, curiosity, imagination and capacity to learn.

My interaction with the people of the surrounding villages revealed something even more important. I encountered enormous reservoirs of knowledge, skill and expertise embedded in ordinary people and everyday life. Traditional farmers possessed generations of accumulated practical knowledge. Practitioners of traditional medicine held valuable experience and expertise. Local communities possessed rich knowledge of history, culture, environment and social systems. Many people also demonstrated a natural capacity for invention and innovation.

Yet this enormous village brain power remained largely invisible.

There was no mechanism to identify it, organise it, develop it, reproduce it or convert it into economic and social value. Knowledge, skills, talents and expertise existed — but they were not recognised or treated as productive economic assets.

This was the problem that conventional economics could not help me solve.

1. The Question That Changed My Intellectual Direction

After two years of teaching conventional economics, I began to concentrate on a question that would define the next five decades.

Economists had of course written about knowledge. But in my view there was no sufficiently developed methodology for analysing knowledge itself as a distinct economic resource or product with its own structure, production process, consumption pattern and growth dynamics.

Knowledge was frequently treated simply as information. Even major philosophical and economic traditions had not developed adequate operational tools for treating knowledge as something that could be systematically analysed in terms of its production, consumption, accumulation, transformation and economic utilisation.

In 1978 I therefore began my research into what I called the Economics of Knowledge, Skills and Expertise.

2. Searching for the Structure of Knowledge

My research focused on fundamental questions. What is knowledge? How is it produced? How is it consumed? What are its internal building blocks? How does knowledge flow from one individual or system to another? How does the consumption of existing knowledge contribute to the production of new knowledge?

I came to the conclusion that knowledge production is fundamentally a process of thinking supported by the consumption and utilisation of previously available knowledge.

I explored the idea that the building blocks of knowledge are concepts, which may exist at micro, basic, advanced, sophisticated and mega levels. I attempted to formulate an operational definition of knowledge:

A network of related concepts organised and structured according to logical and cybernetic principles.

In this framework knowledge is not merely passive information. It is the outcome of Natural Intelligence acting upon, processing and transforming previously acquired or consumed knowledge. That perspective led me to examine the relationship between knowledge consumption and knowledge production as an economic and developmental process.

3. From the Economics of Knowledge to a Theory of Knowledge Production

An important stage came with the publication of my book Library Resource Allocation by MCB University Press in the United Kingdom and the United States in 1981.

My research subsequently developed into theoretical work on the relationship between knowledge consumption and production. This culminated in my Theory of Knowledge Consumption and Production Correlation and the Stage Theory of Knowledge Consumption and Production Growth, published in 1985 by the USSR Academy of Sciences in The Theoretical Problems of Informatics, edited by Professor A. I. Mikhailov, in multiple languages.

These developments strengthened my conviction that knowledge required a distinct analytical framework — one capable of studying not merely information systems, but the internal dynamics of knowledge itself.

4. Knowledge Meets Mathematics, Cybernetics and Brain Research

My subsequent research increasingly drew upon cybernetics, brain research, information technology and later artificial intelligence. The central challenge became more ambitious.

If knowledge has structure, if it is produced through identifiable processes, and if it flows through individuals and institutions, can its dynamics be modelled, measured, organised and technologically augmented?

That question led me, in 2005, to propose Knowmatics — a framework I described as the mathematics and cybernetics of knowledge, together with the emerging science and technology required for a knowledge industry. Knowmatics represented, for me, a transition from studying the economics of knowledge to exploring the possibility of engineering systems for knowledge production, organisation, transformation and utilisation.

5. From Knowledge Banks to Distributed Knowledge Factories

In 2010 I proposed the concept of Dynamic Knowledge Banks, based on a departure from conventional repositories of information. A Dynamic Knowledge Bank would not merely store knowledge. It could organise, update, connect, process and help generate new knowledge.

The rapid development of Artificial Intelligence subsequently created new possibilities. By 2025 my work had developed further toward the concepts of Distributed Knowledge Factories and Knowledge Outlets, supported by Augmented Natural Intelligence and AI–NI integration.

The underlying idea is simple but potentially transformative. Knowledge does not exist only in universities, research laboratories and large corporations. It exists in villages and communities; farms and workshops; homes and families; hospitals and schools; businesses and offices; local administrations; cultural institutions; and in the accumulated experience, skills and problem-solving capacity of billions of people.

The emerging challenge is to create systems capable of identifying this distributed human knowledge, connecting it with scientific knowledge and Artificial Intelligence, transforming it into new knowledge products and services, and creating new opportunities for income, employment and innovation.

6. Towards the Knowledge Industrial Revolution

I now believe the world may be approaching a new stage of industrial transformation.

Previous industrial revolutions primarily transformed the production of physical goods. The digital revolution transformed the processing and transmission of information. Artificial Intelligence is now transforming the capacity to process, generate and apply knowledge.

The next major challenge may therefore be the industrialisation of knowledge production itself. Its central question is no longer simply how we can use knowledge to improve existing industries. The more fundamental question is how knowledge itself can become systematically produced, organised, augmented, distributed and transformed into new products, services, enterprises, employment and income opportunities.

Such a transformation could fundamentally alter the relationship between education, work, innovation and economic development. It could make it possible to move from a world in which millions of people primarily compete for limited jobs to one in which increasing numbers participate in the creation, production and commercialisation of knowledge.

7. A Journey That Began with One Observation

Looking back, the question that first confronted me in rural Kerala remains relevant.

Why should the knowledge, skills, creativity and problem-solving capacity of ordinary people remain economically invisible?

For more than fifty years my work has been an attempt to develop answers to that question. The journey has moved from the village brain to the Economics of Knowledge; from the Economics of Knowledge to theories of knowledge consumption and production; from those theories to Knowmatics; from Knowmatics to Dynamic Knowledge Banks and Distributed Knowledge Factories; and from there to the emerging vision of a Knowledge Industrial Revolution.

I am now working to advance international dialogue and collaboration toward a World Summit on the Knowledge Industrial Revolution. My objective is not merely to present another theory about the knowledge economy. It is to explore whether humanity can build a new economic and technological system capable of recognising, organising and augmenting the distributed intelligence of people — and transforming the world’s vast, largely untapped knowledge, skills and expertise into new productive capacity, innovation, employment, income and human development.

The journey that began in a small region of Kerala fifty years ago is therefore still continuing. Perhaps its most important chapter is yet to be written.