The Milgram Experiment remains one of the most interesting (and controversial) psychological experiments of the 20th Century. Conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1961, the experiment was designed to test whether or not ordinary people were willing to administer a series of increasingly severe electric shocks on the orders of a figure of authority to a test subject who, in reality, was an actor pretending to be electrocuted. Astonishingly, 65% of all participants were willing to do so. Some great footage here.

Update: the old object to the video I linked to was removed from You Tube, so I’ve added in the new one.

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.�?�

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Today’s word is “Biopower” (also sometimes referred to as bio-techno-power), first used by French philosopher Michel Foucault to describe how a state controls its citizens, not through negative means (such as the threat of death or physical coercion), but through more positive means such as by promoting a better life, namely by emphasising the protection of life. As the word implies with “bio”, it has a specific biological aspect to it.

According to Foucault, biopower is how capitalist and democratic societies controlled their citizens, and it was “an indispensible element” for the “development of capitalism” because it helped adjust “the phenomena of population to economic processes”.

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Today’s quote comes from an old (1995) interview in Wired with AI researcher Douglas Hofstadter where he talks about the complexity of the human spirit:

“If such minds of infinite subtlety and complexity and emotional depth [like Bach] could be trivialized by a small chip, it would destroy my sense of what humanity is about - what humans are about, what love is about, what caring about people is about, and what humor is.”