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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More commonly referred to as the “Deep Web“, it’s defined as “World Wide Web content [that is] not part of the surface Web indexed by search engines”. I prefer deepnet myself because a) I can use it for the word of the day, and b) it sounds cooler.

I found a reference to it while searching for DARPA on Google, and was interested to discover that they had funded (along with a host of other US groups like the NSA and the US Air Force) an AI-based deep web search engine that is now being run under a commercial company called Fetch. According to another news article on Computer World, the search is “used by government agencies seeking to rapidly import and integrate data from multiple Web sites and databases for emergency response, location intelligence and antiterrorism efforts”.

Yet another great example of how the military-industrial complex continues to drive technology.