A non-Abelian K-theory and pseudo-isotopies of 3-manifolds

A non-Abelian version of algebraic K-theory, based on automorphism of free products rather than automorphisms of free modules, is considered and is related to pseudo-isotopies of 3-manifolds.Sometime after writing this paper I learned that some of the algebraic results in it were first proved by Gersten in [13]. Specifically each of Theorems 3.1, 3.2 and 5.1 in the special case when is the trivial group, and Theorem 3.3 and its corollaries are all results of Gersten. I have left the paper as it is for the sake of completeness and since the approach here often differs considerably from Gersten's.