Swarm Creativity Blog

Cryptocurrencies bring out the worst in digital greed: John Woeltz, 37, and an accomplice were charged with holding a man captive for three weeks in a Manhattan townhouse— torturing him in an attempt to steal his Bitcoin password . The horror of it is hard to overstate. But even more unsettling is what it reveals about a growing subculture: a ruthless obsession with crypto wealth, removed from any sense of ethics, community, or shared future. These are the crypto leeches—people who see money not as a lubricant for life, but as the point of life. Their behavior mirrors what I described in a recent post about how money, when disconnected from meaning, begins to take over the host like a parasite—hijacking the human mind, turning imagination into speculation, community into competition, and security into surveillance. If parasitic control is one metaphor, then nature offers us a better one: In that earlier post, I proposed a different vision: mycorrhizal finance, modeled after the underg...

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...

Social Compass will tell you if you behave like a creative and collaborative bee , like a hard-working and competitive ant , or like a selfish egoistic leech .  Enter “vm-sc.galaxyadvisors.com” on a browser like Chrome on your smartphone. The Social Compass will also tell you your state of mind, are you currently happy or stressed. In addition it will tell you your tribes, are you a nerd, a fatherlander, a treehugger, or a spiritualist. This is all done based on the words you are using, which are compared anonymously and encrypted using the latest advances in AI trained with the words that tribal leaders are using (e.g. Elon Musk is a prototypical nerd). In the current version, Social Compass takes as input your emails (gmail, outlook) or teams messages, plus the messages you are receiving. We are currently working on a version that will also include your WhatsApp messages. Social Compass will also give you an overview of your current discussions, showing the happy or angry tone of...