Swarm Creativity Blog

1. The Rosenkreuzer Dream The Three Manifestos and Their Promise In 1614, an anonymous text appeared in Kassel, Germany, that would shake the intellectual foundations of Europe. The Fama Fraternitatis described a secret brotherhood founded by one Christian Rosenkreutz — a man who had traveled to the East, learned the hidden arts of nature, and returned to establish an invisible college of enlightened minds. A year later, the Confessio Fraternitatis followed, and in 1616, the allegorical Chymische Hochzeit (Chemical Wedding) completed the trilogy. These were not merely occult curiosities. They landed in the middle of Europe’s most turbulent intellectual transition — the bridge between Renaissance magic and Enlightenment science. The manifestos spoke to Kepler’s generation, to physicians frustrated by Galenic dogma, to natural philosophers who sensed that the “ Book of Nature ” could be read if only one had the right eyes. The core promises of the Rosenkreuzer brotherhood were breat...

“ Why is it that Nobel prize winners are always nice, and the people right below them on the professional ladder are complete assholes?”  This question was asked to me about ten years ago by one of my hosts, a senior professor in economics, when I was giving a talk at a university in Florida.   My host was perfectly right – fully confirmed by my own experience of the last 22 years at MIT. A fair share of Nobel prize winners reside at MIT and Harvard, and many others come to visit – usually they are a pleasure to talk to, and amazingly approachable. The same universities are full of people with huge egos, right below the Nobel prize winners, who are convinced that they deserve the Nobel prize and just didn’t get it because some assholes were against them. These people pull the levers at the most respected academic institutions, as editors in chief of prestigious scientific journals, making tenure decisions for junior faculty, and deciding on funding and promotions. Usually, the...

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...

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...