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My life in Alternative Realities - fatherlanders and nerds don’t go well together

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We are all living in different alternative realities, people with different personalities see reality from very different perspectives, potentially leading to a lot of friction and misunderstandings. “Nerds” are open to change, they believe in the progress of technology and innovation. “Fatherlanders” abhor change, they like tradition and authority, valuing the fatherland above all, and would like to reestablish the good old times. “Spiritualists” believe into supernatural forces, they are religious, meditate and hope that the forces of nature will heal their ailing. “Treehuggers” believe into sustainability and global warming, they want to save nature by restricting technical progress. I experience  this friction frequently in my daily life. As a computer and technology nerd with spiritualist and treehugger inclinations, my communication with members from other tribes sometimes does not end well.  My interactions with officers of the US Department of Homeland Security and the FBI taug
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Taking control of your emotions leads to a more meaningful life - The ERM Way to Happiness!

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It’s all about relationships: interacting with other people can be the biggest source of happiness, but it can also be the biggest source of misery! The quality of your relationships is determined by your emotions: When you manage your emotions during a disagreement with your best friend, it helps keep your friendship intact. However, if you lose control and get really angry, it can lead to losing your job or even causing harm in situations like road rage. Your relationships also determine the meaning in your life. If you have spent years searching for the meaning of life but nobody else cares about it, your hard work won't bring much satisfaction.You will only get meaning from what you do if you are surrounded by likeminded people. Even more, the people who make you happiest will also tell you WHAT makes you happiest! To measure and improve happiness, I thus came up with the “Emotions, Relationships, and Meaning” (ERM) Way to Happiness. We have previously used the PERMA model fro
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From Psychohistory to Babelfish – From predicting the future to mind-reading

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My research of the last twenty years was inspired by Isaac Asimov’s fictional science of psychohistory . In his Foundation Series science fiction stories, Asimov describes how mathematician Hari Seldon was able to predict the future a thousand years ahead through the discipline of psychohistory that Seldon invented. Its premise was that while it is impossible to predict the behavior of an individual, the aggregated behavior of millions and billions of people extending over the galaxy can be predicted accurately by studying their communication patterns. However already in his stories Asimov posited that it is impossible to predict “ black swan events ”, i.e. unexpected random events. In Asimov’s story, the appearance of the “Mule”, a mutant conqueror who could read and manipulate the mind of others, a few hundred years after Seldon made his predictions, threw Seldon’s predictions totally off. This is where Babelfish comes in, a tool envisioned by Douglas Adams in his science fiction c
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If good people make AI, can AI make good people?

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The developers of ChatGPT built extremely useful software, putting a “Wikipedia on steroids” at our fingertips by leveraging collective intelligence in ways never seen before. In this sense, as defined by Plato and Aristotle over two thousand years ago, they are “good people”. This means they are morally good or virtuous by giving away a highly beneficial software product for free that makes many chores of the daily life of knowledge workers much easier. These AI developers are thus acting according to the golden rule (of reciprocity), treating others as they would like to be treated. The problem is that not everybody who writes AI software is a “good” person. If only one percent of AI developers acts entirely egoistic, or even malicious, there is the risk that these “bad apples” will abuse the power of AI for their own sinister purposes, without any consideration for the wellbeing of the rest of us. But what if we could turn the power of AI on these “bad apples”, to identify them be
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Will AI (artificial intelligence) ever replace psychotherapists? - a dialog with ChatGPT

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Increasingly people confess their deepest psychological problems to artificial intelligence instead of a human psychotherapist. While I don’t think AI will fully replace human psychotherapists in in the near future, ever since Weizenbaum in 1964 created the psychotherapy program “Eliza”, people discuss issues about their inner self with seemingly ever more intelligent AI. My co-author Marc Schreiber and I just finished a short book for the Springer Essentials series discussing the role of AI for different aspects of psychology (in German). As ChatGPT is capable of leading increasingly sophisticated dialogs about basically any topic , we decided to let it rewrite our book, using the same chapter structure as the Springer book, but all content written by ChatGPT. Here is the l ink to the formatted book rewritten by ChatGPT , as well as the transcript of our dialog with ChatGPT , both in German, as well as the translation to English by Deepl of the ChatGPT book. On a side note, as Sp
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My new Happimetrics book just came out!

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  Happimetrics: Leveraging AI to Untangle the Surprising Link Between Ethics, Happiness and Business Success By Peter Gloor What is my book about? Knowing what makes you happy will increase your happiness! Based on 20 years of rigorous MIT research, this book introduces “virtual mirroring”, analyzing individuals’ communication patterns with AI, and making them self-aware by mirroring their behavior back to them in a privacy-respecting way. It applies artificial intelligence to identify personality characteristics and ethical values based on body language and interaction with others. It builds on the concept of groupflow—when teams collaborate at their best through intrinsic motivation and positive stress. The book suggests tracking communication by combining machine learning and social network concepts, to measure emotions, social network change, morals, and tribes ,  leading to entangled teams of humans and other species such as dogs, horses, and mimosa and basil plants. get it here
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The best books about interspecies communication

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Today Shepherd published a list with my favourite five books about interspecies communication . There is also a bookshelf with more book recommendations about similar topics. Check it out!
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