The New York Times has a great article about two competing trends, namely using drugs to augment intelligence and creativity, or using “mind expanding” technology to do it instead. (Forget, for a moment, the weed-puffing dope smokers would tell you there’s a natural creative enhancer already). One argument it gives against using drugs is that the “creativity shortcut” of using a pill may create a “delusional state” where “weak ideas are mistaken for strong ones”.

Supporters of using technology argue that computer networks are great enablers of human creativity because they can “share ideas with people they�??ve never met”. Quoting Lawrence Lessig, he points out that the Internet helps create “ideas that are more robust and create a wider range of perspectives.�?�

While this is true to an extent, the article doesn’t mention that the exact same deficiency with drugs is immediately apparent with the Internet, too. A great example is the comedian Steven Colbert’s notion of “wikiality“: “A reality where, if enough people agree with a notion, it becomes the truth.” Group-think projects such as Wikipedia can also help create a “delusional state”, not through chemicals, but through consensus.

Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy Wikipedia as a starting part for learning, and I often link to a subject to give readers a quick overview, but it’s risky to think that technology doesn’t suffer from similar flaws as drugs. (This is not even going into a discussion about whether the information from Google is reliable considering the effects of search engine manipulation to get better rankings). And if we want to constantly rely on computers to give us the information we’re looking for, we better be damn sure that they don’t reduce it into binaries of “this is true” and “this is false”.

At any rate, the article concludes with an interesting observation:

By now it is clear that Big Pharma and Big Computing are running an unspoken race, to decide which technology �?? the electronic or the biochemical �?? can first deliver the magic elixir that gives humans vastly improved creative powers. Might we be heading, however fitfully, toward a new industrial age when Microsoft buys Merck to better compete with Google?

Merck + Microsoft = Creativity? I’d be quite curious to see the end-user license on that package.