Swarm Creativity Blog

 The answer seems to be: nobody! With Covid raging on, we are all living under fear and stress. Countries such as China, New Zealand, or Japan that succeeded in keeping it contained, are hunkering down behind Chinese Walls, while the rest of the World is desperately searching for miracle cures. Our daily life is heavily influenced by coping and surviving under Covid19. Self-proclaimed Covid19 experts are inundating us with a never-ending stream of news and insights. These experts come from two opposing sides: mainstream science and government experts on the one side, and conspiracy theorists on the other side.  Figuring out whom to believe, with so many “experts” contradicting each other can become a real headache. Politicians, regulators, and scientists in different countries, and even within the same country, are fundamentally disagreeing and fighting with each other about the best strategies for coping with the disease.  To shed some light, we did a coolhunting using G...

Increasing workplace satisfaction and recognizing employee burnout before it happens are core issues in today’s Covid-19 home office workplace. People analytics has become a key technology to support these goals, thanks to recent progress in AI, machine learning, and other computer technologies. Using our own people analytics tools we analyzed the virtual tribe of key people working in the area of people analytics. If anything, this analysis shows that people analytics has become even more central in the Covid-world.  Using our Galaxyscope Tribefinder tool we created a virtual tribe of 57 Thought Leaders in the space of HR analytics, people analytics, and corporate culture. The picture below shows the social network of the people analytics thought leaders based on their Twitter network. Thought leaders are connected through who is retweeting and mentioning whom. It also categorizes each thought leader into an “alternative reality” tribe, identifying if somebody is a fatherlander, ...

 This morning I was asked this great question, which I am struggling to answer, as this is a problem with many dimensions. Anyway, here is my try to give a partial answer. The first answer is “never ending curiosity”. I wake up in the morning just wondering why things are how they are. Why are trees growing towards light, and not towards darkness? Why do we need light to live? Photosynthesis describes a pattern, but does not give the fundamental answer. There is always so many more questions than answers, and every answer brings more questions. The second answer is “I want to find answers to questions I am passionate about”. So, you need to find your passion. How to find your passion? One answer is looking at other people. Whom do you admire most? What are people whom you find cool doing? For instance, Elon Musk said that he was most inspired by Nikola Tesla, as a consequence he started exploring electricity, ultimately building electric cars and naming his company “Tesla”. The are...

 While we humans have a hard time communicating among ourselves, we find it even more difficult to communicate with individuals of other species. The main interaction between species consists of eating members of other species, or being eaten. We humans consume huge amounts of pig, cow, and chicken meat, drink milk, eat eggs, bread, rice, corn and other veggies. However, when we are not eating plants and animals, we also like to talk to them. Some people even talk to their houseplants. And owners of dogs, cats, and horses of course talk to their pets all the time, maybe even considering them their soulmates. But do the plants and animals really understand what we are trying to say to them? And even more important, can we understand what the dog, horse, cat, or a mimosa or basil plant is trying to say to us? Before we can start talking to others, we need to listen to what they have to say, and try to make sense of their output. Computers and artificial intelligence have made huge pr...

Noah Harari in his book “Sapiens” makes the argument that humans make pigs, chicken, and cows the most successful species by breeding them in immense numbers and thus creating a huge gene pool. Humans are doctoring around in this gene pool, for instance breeding chickens to gain weight rapidly for more meat production. But as these poor chickens can not even walk anymore, this gene doctoring leads to evolutionary dead ends. Coronavirus seems to be doing the same to humans, it is treating us like we are treating the pigs, breeding us to provide the best possible living environment for Covid19. Towards that goal, it kills the least attractive hosts, old people that will not live much longer to spread the virus, bald men, which have too much testosterone , and overweight people who frequently have preexisting conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and lung disease. It seems thus that Covid19 is weeding out the weak to improve the gene pool of the human race for further succe...

What is “truth”?  Truth is highly subjective and depends on the individual context, likes, personality, and ethical values of a person. What is “truth” for you depends in whom you trust and in whom you believe. If you are a farmer and Republican voter of Donald Trump in the rust belt of the US, you believe China needs to be punished for ripping of the US and you trust the words of Donald Trump and are willing to sacrifice sales of your grain or pork to China for the greater good of your country. If you are a Chinese Communist party member, you believe the US is striving for World domination and is using whatever means available to subdue China, you trust the words of Xi Jinping and are willing to bring personal sacrifices for the greater good of the Chinese nation. The same split perception of what is “true” applies to many other issues, from the effectiveness or dangers of vaccines, miracle cures against the Coronavirus, to when the world was created (4.54 billion years ago accor...

Technically, AI can now do many cognitive tasks much better than humans, molecular modeling is one of them, NLP and image recognition are among the most well-known. But will AI become truly creative? Or in other words, can AI predict unknown unknowns. We already know it is great in discovering and solving known unknowns? Philosophically speaking the question is if the next Einstein will be an AI system. The answer is most likely yes. The saying is that humans are unbelievably complex. I have found that humans are extremely simple, always applying simple heuristics. The point is that we are not aware of these heuristics and come up with super complex models and explanations, leading at times to wild conspiracy theories. Mr.Trump is embodying this with his wild theories, ranging from vaccination theories to Obamagate, while his simple heuristic is “do what will most likely get me re-elected”, unimpeded by any ethical constraints and restrictions. We just need to apply Occam’s razor...

There are four main motivators that drive all our actions: money, power, glory and love, see e.g. t his previous post , and this   post . These motivations are all driven by social interaction in networks. So it does not come as a surprise that Social Network Analysis (SNA) has huge potential to measure and improve an individual’s and an organization’s money, power, glory, and love. --> Motivation SNA application Our own research  Covid19 use case Money Stock trend prediction Marketing, finding customers ·         Predicting Stock Market Indicators Through Twitter: "I hope it is not as bad as I fear" ,  ·         Selling toilet paper, hand sanitizer, face masks online Power Election prediction ·         Methods for Co-Designing a Collaborative Chronic Care Network (C3N).   ·         Epidemio...

Bees are good for everyone. Not only are they producing honey which is widely loved and was the main sweetener for millennia, honey also has valuable medical properties. But more importantly, bees are absolutely essential as pollinators, pollinating up to 80% of all cultivated crop plants. Without bees there would be no apples, no cherries, no peaches, no nuts, and no herbs. Without bees, life as we know it would be impossible. Sheep produce useful and less useful things. Their wool is great for keeping us warm in the winter, and if slaughtered their mutton is tasty. Their poop can be useful as fertilizer, but it can also get greatly in the way when we step into it. And if there are fruit trees on a pasture where sheep are grazing, they will chew up their bark and leaves, and kill the trees in no time. Leeches are parasites, that attach their suckers to their prey animal, and feed on the blood of their host. In the front of their mouth they have three teeth, which they slice thr...