There's an hour and a half before my first Java practical, so let's see if I can't fit in a little lump of blog...

So! My gosh. First week of the Geography and Geographical Information Systems MA before the PhD. Tsk. Pff! Sampled all the modules I'm going to sample this semester. Beginning again - another little floating blob in a sea of Brownian-motion students all bouncing seemingly without purpose around the campus of Leeds Uni.

Done a first bit of reading in the Bodington Library - a smaller simulacra of the British Library, from what I remember of that. A damn fine place to read. Oh my God, libraries are wonderful things.

I hope I always remember to go there and work sometimes. Libraries are wonderful things; librarians, as in Michael Moore's book, noble defenders of knowledge. (Think really bad swords and sorcerors film staring an entire cast of magic-wielding, and probably scantily clad & nubile defenders of knowledge. Wearing glasses. The only force standing between the total blackness of oblivion and the light of our accumulated wisdom. I worry about me sometimes.) Students - ants re-creating that knowledge, altering it, giving up our puny little minds to act as agents of its evolution.

You can hear the human in there: the slight, but all-pervasive and soothing, sussuration of movement scurrying about the place. Also, of course, the intermittent waves of terror from people straining to fulfilling their allotted role. It makes me think of Lanier's rant about digital Maoism (written about in this blog here).

Empowering the collective does not empower individuals — just the reverse is true. There can be useful feedback loops set up between individuals and the hive mind, but the hive mind is too chaotic to be fed back into itself.

Libraries don't re-create themselves. They don't exist independently of us, and they're not static. Knowledge is dynamic and human. It's our most powerful extended phenotype (or possibly extended memotype... hmm, maybe not!)

It's all a bit scary. Just been reading through a little Hayek (though I'm not going to have much time for this until much later... far too many techie things to learn) - here and there, he'd spend ten years re-formulating entire theories from scratch in order to integrate some vital factor he thought was missing. He seems, also, to have come up with a theory of mind that involves internal evolutionary processes to explain the sensory order. I've read that in Dennett, and its (I think) central to neural net evolution.

My point? Gosh, there's a lot of learning to be done.

Looking back on the first blog entry, though, I see my thinking has already changed. This week has really reinforced that change. The current revolution in computing power in Geographical Information Systems is, well, terrifying. There's plenty of people here working on them. Wireless computing systems, for example: intel are apparently churning out vast quantities of these tiny little computers able to talk to each other, setting up ubiquitous distributed systems over geographical areas. (The military are as always some way ahead of everyone else on this - e.g. 'sensors dispersed by fans... once a complete picture of the target city is built up, unmanned air and ground vehicles can now be vectored directly to selected targets to take them out, one by one'. See this New Statesman article.) Mapping systems are being used to control and plan pretty much every aspect of our daily lives, as well as helping governments and corporations constantly push the boundaries of planning their organisation.

All this says to me: don't spend too long digging into the philosophical nuances of planning versus spontaneous order. There are people in the military, government, corporations, god knows what else, already planning, and already creating complex feedback systems, ceding decision-making and logistics to computers where they can - because it saves money. (And helps increase market share, of course.)

If there's one thing to spend time on that perhaps the techies don't, it would be looking for where the political choices are. Technology as a historical force is often portrayed as entirely beyond human control, and also as politically neutral. But for every advance in computing power, and every further percolation of these systems into our human world, the political choices become more and more important.

What if we only get a very small time to make those choices? What if these systems are growing into human society like another nervous system - impossible to rip out once it's embedded without killing the host? Once embedded, will it be a military nightmare? Will it have fixed global exploitation firmly into the natural order of things? By then, there's a fair chance that it'll be too late to change it.

Ah, it'll probably all turn out OK in the end. Bound to, really.