This is the key to everything. We can turn a million people into one wise, creative, and powerful brain. Decentralize all systems on Earth – governments, businesses, and more – with swarm intelligence

COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE – Sometimes referred to as “The Wisdom of Crowds,” or “Human Swarm Intelligence,” or just “swarming.” It is the shared group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and combined efforts of individuals. It is real and testable. It usually requires several conditions to optimize: 1) Decentralization 2) Diversity of Opinion – aka individualism 3) Coordination/Alignment/signal (How do the individuals interact, what problem are they solving together, and do they understand the problem?) 4) Aggregation – a way to aggregate answers from the group, often technological 5) Trust – in both the system and earned trust with each of the people in the swarm

SWARM – a decentralized group of individuals who collaborate or coordinate their actions in a collective manner, often facilitated by technology, who are on the same problem solving mission together.

A new weeklyish feature on awesome and interesting stuff at the frontier of science, technology, and beyond

The internet loves bad news. Researchers have shown that negative headlines attract more clicks, and antagonistic emotions, such as outrage, stimulate more viral sharing. So, one easy way to grow an independent media company or newsletter would be for me to focus relentlessly on all the most terrible things happening in the world.

I really don’t want to do that. The news cycle is a mess, and the world is full of crisis. But while the news media typically excels at pulling our attention toward developments that are sudden and negative, the press often fails to educate audiences about changes in the world that are slow or positive, even as the latter stories sometimes matter more in the long run.

That’s the thinking behind the Sunday Morning Post, a weeklyish rundown of the most interesting or wondrous stuff I’m seeing in science, technology, economics, and beyond. The goal of this feature is to utterly and completely fail every test of the 24-hour news cycle. I want to share findings and discoveries and stories that will be as critically relevant to our lives in 10 years as they are in 10 hours.

What it is
The age reversal breakthrough we’ve all been waiting for will soon be here, faster than I ever imagined. Dr. David Sinclair’s lab has cracked the code on epigenetic reprogramming, potentially moving from $400,000 gene therapies to $100 pills that can reset biological age by 50 – 95% in just four weeks. What started as theory in 2017 became the proven science of epigenetic reprogramming in 2020, and now AI is accelerating development at unprecedented speed. As Sinclair puts it: “Imagine in 10 years you just take a pill three times per week for a month and you get younger.” This Moonshot is becoming reality.

Why it Matters

From Gene Therapy to Pills: The Demonetization Revolution

Sinclair’s lab is using AI to accelerate the speed of discoveries and demonetize costs. The idea of epigenetic reprogramming was previously thought to require viral vectors or gene therapies, which could be expensive.

But as Dr. Sinclair and I discussed in my new deep-dive Moonshots podcast with him, recent research using a host of AI tools has yielded surprising results. (Check out the pod, it’s one of my best conversations with Sinclair!) His team at Harvard has used AI to discover a host of molecules that can be taken as a pill able to reverse aging. As Sinclair told me, “This would only cost a hundred dollars or less to make for a month’s course of treatment.” That’s roughly three dollars a day to potentially reverse decades of aging.

The Mouse & Primate Studies That Change Everything

Earlier this year, Sinclair’s lab tried an experiment that delivered stunning results. Mice given the oral cocktail “Monday, Wednesday, Friday for four weeks” didn’t just feel younger, quantitative biological age tests confirmed that they actually were younger. “All the mice that were on the treatment ended up behaving and being physiologically younger.”

In parallel to his work using “pills,” his team at Life Biosciences is also collecting primate data using viral gene therapy treatments that make this breakthrough undeniable. Working with green monkeys—our closest research analogs—Sinclair’s team achieved something unprecedented: “95% of the age goes backwards” in optic nerve tissue. As Sinclair puts it, “some of the data is just stunning. You can map whether you reverse the age of the optic nerve in these animals.” The effect is controllable and semi-permanent: “The longer you leave it on, the younger the tissue gets,” and the rejuvenation persists even after treatment stops.

These aren’t mere lab curiosities. Primates share 93% of our DNA and have similar aging mechanisms. When age reversal works this dramatically in our closest biological relatives, human translation becomes not just possible, but probable.

Sinclair’s Vision for The Next Decade (2025 – 2035)

When I asked Sinclair to envision 2035, his response was immediate: we’re looking at three distinct delivery methods racing to market, each more accessible than the last.

Method 1: Gene Therapy (2026): Sinclair’s co-founded company Life Biosciences enters human trials next January, targeting glaucoma and stroke in the eye. Gene therapies typically cost $300,000 – $400,000 per eye, potentially reaching $2 million for rare diseases. “The reason is there are a lot of hurdles to get through to get to the market. And just producing this stuff is expensive,” says Sinclair, noting it’s “costing us more than $10 million just to make the first batch to go into humans.” But his mission is democratization: “My lab is in existence to make this for everybody. We’re not here to charge as much as we can. We’re here to make it hopefully eventually pennies on the dollar.”

Method 2: Gene Therapies Using Yamanaka Factors in Humans (2030s): A one-time injection makes you able to activate youth genes by simply taking an antibiotic for a few weeks. “Every time we want to get rejuvenated or we have an injury, we need to heal quickly, then we turn them on.” The system uses doxycycline, a safe antibiotic, to activate the engineered genes. “We’ve engineered it so you can just take an antibiotic (doxycycline) for a few weeks, it’s very safe, and you turn on the age reversal.”

Method 3: The Age Reversal Pill (2035): These pills are under development now and are likely to become available over the next 3 – 10 years. These are AI-designed and/or AI-identified molecules that can activate epigenetic cellular reprogramming. The pills have two major advantages. First, they’re cheap. Second, “they evenly go throughout the body to all the tissues” once swallowed. This is Sinclair’s ultimate target: accessible, affordable, comprehensive age reversal.

The Longevity Escape Velocity Timeline

While colleagues debate whether we’ll reach Longevity Escape Velocity by 2030, Sinclair focuses on the science: “Now that the Information Theory of Aging and the reset seem true, we’re entering the clinic with these age reversal technologies that can be used multiple times—not just once, but you can keep doing it maybe 20 times, 100 times.”

He stands by his earlier prediction: 

“The first person to live to 150 has already been born.”

For teenagers today, Sinclair said, “we can expect them to live well into the 22nd century.

Your Mission: Bridge the Gap

The technology exists. The timeline is clear. Your challenge is staying healthy long enough to intercept these breakthroughs.

What you need to know: What we’re looking at now isn’t the worst job market college graduates have ever seen. It is, however, the worst such market compared with workers in general that we’ve ever seen, by a large margin. Nobody knows for sure why this is happening, but it’s not a good omen. And the recent graduates themselves will be hurt, not just in the near term, but for the rest of their lives.

So what does a business do in the face of this kind of uncertainty? It tries to avoid making commitments that it may soon regret.

And hiring recent college graduates is a significant commitment. Whatever their formal training, young people need to acquire real-world experience to be effective in their new jobs. Employers need to be willing to spend time and money while new hires gain this experience. And in this uncertain environment, that’s not a commitment employers are willing to make. They may hold on to their existing workers, at least for now, but they won’t hire.

In addition to generating and evaluating design candidates, there are several additional ways that LLMs, sometimes coupled with other AI technologies, are being used to accelerate various activities in the product development process:

Identifying and analyzing customer/user needs, products, and features. LLM-powered software solutions are being used, particularly by consumer companies, to synthesize a vast array of product reviews, social media posts, customer service transcripts, and other sources of customer data to identify addressable market segments and the product categories and features/functions that would best address the as-yet unmet needs of customers.

Exploring and synthesizing existing research and data. In industries such as life sciences, chemicals, and materials, there is a vast and rapidly growing body of published research and databases. It can be challenging for scientists to keep up with the literature in their own subdiscipline, not to mention the adjacent or even distant areas of other research, which could bring insights for breakthroughs in their field. Oftentimes, the volume of machine-readable data being made available is growing even more rapidly than published papers.

Few stories better reveal what Dalio’s book Principles is truly about. Not finance. Not strategy. But the meticulous art of learning from one’s errors, of building a life in which mistakes are not buried, but broadcast, dissected, and translated into algorithms for better thinking. Dalio’s eventual success, building the world’s largest Hedge Fund, wasn’t in spite of that moment. It was because of it.

The Two “Yous”

This is a big problem. The first fertility transition was a good thing — it was the result of the world getting richer, it saved human living standards from hitting a Malthusian ceiling, and it seemed like with wise policies, rich countries could keep their fertility near replacement rates. But this second fertility transition is going to be an economic catastrophe if it continues.

The difference between a fertility rate of 1 and a rate of 2 might seem a lot smaller than the difference between 2 and 6. But because of the math of exponential curves, it’s actually just as important of a change. Going from 6 to 2 means your population goes from exploding to stable; going from 2 to 1 means your population goes from stable to vanishing.

Shrinking populations are continuously aging populations, meaning that each young working person has to support more and more retirees every year. On top of that, population aging appears to slow down productivity growth through various mechanisms. Immigration can help a bit, but it can’t really solve this problem, since A) when the whole world has low fertility there is no longer a source of young immigrants, and B) immigration is bad at improving dependency ratios because immigrants are already partway to retirement.

For the first time, social media overtakes TV as Americans’ top news source

There’s always been a lot of hand wringing over how the “mainstream media” covers particular issues, especially political ones, but we’re at a point where the term “mainstream media” is pretty much an anachronism. Independent media wields significant influence now, and we have the collective ability to drive attention and interest toward issues regardless of how they’re covered by the legacy media. That’s not to say that traditional media doesn’t continue to play an important role in our information ecosystem, but it’s no longer the gatekeeper it once was. [Nieman Lab]

$250K from LinkedIn in one year

Platforms like Threads and Bluesky are often cited as the main Twitter competitors, but LinkedIn was probably the greatest beneficiary of the post-Elon Twitter exodus, especially since it absorbed a lot of the business influencers who used to publish long viral tweet threads. I think one of LinkedIn’s biggest assets is that it doesn’t have restrictive character limits, and instead simply hides longer posts behind a “read more” button. This allowed people to start using it as something closer to a real blogging platform — a more scalable Medium, at least when it comes to business content. [Creator Spotlight]

What makes you happy? Perhaps a good night’s sleep, or a wonderful meal with friends?

I am the director of the Happiness Lab at Drexel University, where I also teach a course on happiness. The Happiness Lab is a think tank that investigates the ingredients that contribute to people’s happiness.

Often, my students ask me something along the lines of, “Dr. Z, tell us one thing that will make us happier.”

As a first step, I advise them to spend more time outside.

Achieving lasting and sustainable happiness is more complicated. Research on the happiest countries in the world and the places where people live the longest, known as Blue Zones, shows a common thread: Residents feel they are part of something larger than themselves, such as a community or a city.

So if you’re living in a metropolis like Philadelphia, where, incidentally, the iconic pursuit of happiness charge was ratified in the Declaration of Independence, I believe urban citizenship – that is, forming an identity with your urban surroundings – should also be on your list.

Safety, social connection, beauty

Carl Jung, the renowned Swiss psychoanalyst, wrote extensively about the relationship between our internal world and our external environment.

He believed that this relationship was crucial to our psychological well-being.

More recent research in neuroscience and functional imaging has revealed a vast, intricate and complex neurological architecture underlying our psychological perception of a place. Numerous neurological pathways and functional loops transform a complex neuropsychological process into a simple realization: I am happy here!

For example, a happy place should feel safe.

The country of Croatia, a tourist haven for its beauty and culinary delights, is also one of the top 20 safest countries globally, according to the 2025 Global Peace Index.

The U.S. ranks 128th.

The availability of good food and drink can also be a significant factor in creating a happy place.

However, according to American psychologist Abraham Maslow, a pioneer in the field of positive psychology, the opportunity for social connectivity, experiencing something meaningful and having a sense of belonging is more crucial.

Furthermore, research on happy places suggests that they are beautiful. It should not come as a surprise that the happiest places in the world are also drop-dead gorgeous, such as the Indian Ocean archipelago of Mauritius, which is the happiest country in Africa, according to the 2025 World Happiness Report from the University of Oxford and others.

Happy places often provide access to nature and promote active lifestyles, which can help relieve stress. The residents of the island of Ikaria in Greece, for example, one of the original Blue Zones, demonstrate high levels of physical activity and social interaction.

Philly Happiness Map

I asked my undergraduate psychology students at Drexel, many of whom come from other cities, states and countries, to pick one place in Philadelphia where they feel happy.

From the 243 student responses, the Happiness Lab curated 28 Philly happy places, based on how frequently the places were endorsed and their accessibility.

Philadelphia’s founder, William Penn, would likely approve that Rittenhouse Square Park and three other public squares – Logan, Franklin and Washington – were included. These squares were vital to Penn’s vision of landscaped public parks to promote the health of the mind and body by providing “salubrious spaces similar to the private garden.” They are beautiful and approachable, serving as “places to rest, take a pause, work, or read a book,” one student told us.

Places such as the Philadelphia Zoo, Penn’s Landing and the Philadelphia Museum of Art are “joyful spots that are fun to explore, and one can also take your parents along if need be,” as another student described.

The Athenaeum of Philadelphia, a historic library with eclectic programming, feels to one student like “coming home, a perfect third place.”

Some students mentioned happy places that are less known. These include tucked-away gardens such as the John F. Collings Park at 1707 Chestnut St., the rooftop Cira Green at 129 S. 30th St. and the James G. Kaskey Memorial Park and BioPond at 433 S. University Ave.

My students said these are small, unexpected spots that provide an excellent opportunity for a quiet, peaceful break, to be present, whether enjoyed alone or with a friend. I checked them out and I agree.

The students also mentioned places I had never heard of even though I’ve lived in the city for over 30 years.

The “cat park” at 526 N. Natrona St. in Mantua is a quiet little park with an eclectic personality and lots of friendly cats.

Mango Mango Dessert at 1013 Cherry St. in Chinatown, which is a frequently endorsed happiness spot among the students because of its “bustling streets, lively atmosphere and delicious food,” is a perfect pit stop for mango lovers. And Maison Sweet, at 2930 Chestnut St. in University City, is a casual bakery and cafe “where you may end up staying longer than planned,” one student shared.

I find that Philly’s happy places, as seen through the eyes of college students, tend to offer a space for residents to take time out from their day to pause, reset, relax and feel more connected and in touch with the city.

Happiness principals are universal, yet our own journeys are very personal. Philadelphians across the city may have their own list of happy places. There are really no right or wrong answers. If you don’t have a personal happy space, just start exploring and you may be surprised what you will find, including a new sense of happiness.

See the full Philly Happiness Map list here, and visit the exhibit at the W.W. Hagerty Library at Drexel University to learn more.

Mounting evidence from genome studies indicates that, contrary to received wisdom, our species has undergone profound biological adaptation in its recent evolutionary past

New research raises the possibility that recent human history involved far more dynamic evolution than previously thought.
In Darwinian biology, the classic conception of natural selection is a “hard sweep,” in which a beneficial mutation allows some individuals to survive longer or produce more offspring such that eventually that variant becomes fixed in the population. In the early 2000s, when researchers were starting to look for signs of hard sweeps in the genomes of contemporary peoples, the clearest examples came from populations that had adapted to unique circumstances. For instance, around 42,000 years ago a selective sweep changed a protein on the surface of red blood cells in Africans to boost their resistance to malaria. People in the Tibetan Highlands underwent selective sweeps for genes that helped them tolerate low oxygen (intriguingly, populations of the Himalayas, Andes and Ethiopian highlands adapted to high altitude with different assortments of genes, taking different evolutionary paths to solve similar problems).

Every semester in New York City, a quiet experiment unfolds: 19-year-olds gather in a classroom at NYU to explore what it means to live a good life. The course is called “Flourishing.”

The premise of the course is simple: Your personal and professional flourishing is directly related to your ability to control your attention.

The course is taught by Professor Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation. When his students begin to reclaim their focus, Haidt sees transformational results: They excel academically, experience fewer distractions, and form deeper, more meaningful connections with their peers.

The Flourishing course taps into an idea that social media—and the constant stimuli of algorithmically engineered digital spaces—has fractured our capacity for sustained focus and presence:

• Haidt told Ezra Klein on a podcast earlier this year that TikTok is “the greatest demolisher of attention in human history.”
• A recent article in The Atlantic cited widespread lamentations by professors that today’s college students don’t have the attention span to read books, let alone a brief sonnet.
• A 2023 study by Common Sense Media found that a typical adolescent now receives 237 notifications a day, or about 15 for every waking hour.

The international conversation on AI is often terribly confusing, since different kinds of AI become fused under the one overarching term. There are three kinds of AI: narrow, general, and super AI, with some grey areas in between. It is very important to clarify these distinctions because each type has very different impacts and vastly different national and international regulatory requirements.

Without national and international regulation, it is inevitable that humanity will lose control of what will become a non-biological intelligence beyond our understanding, awareness, and control. Half of AI researchers surveyed by the Center for Human Technology believe there is a 10 percent or greater chance that humans will go extinct from their inability to control AI. But, if managed well, artificial general intelligence could usher in great advances in the human condition—from medicine, education, longevity, and turning around global warming to advances in scientific understanding of reality and creating a more peaceful world. So, what should policymakers know and do now to achieve the extraordinary benefits while avoiding catastrophic, if not existential, risks?

Go to Peter Diamandis website to sign up for newsletter.

Hollywood is really screwing with our heads and our collective mindset.

King Solomon’s wisdom has never been more important: “Without a vision the people will perish” – Proverbs 29:18

If we want a positive future for humanity – for ourselves and our kids – then we need a vision of tomorrow that is hopeful, compelling, and abundant.

Here are four ways we can drive this transformation:

1. Create an XPRIZE for Optimistic Media: Launch a multi-million-dollar competition for filmmakers, writers, and creators who develop compelling, scientifically-grounded visions of an abundant future. Not rose-colored fantasy, but data-driven optimism that acknowledges challenges while showing paths to overcome them.

2. Build a “Media Abundance Index”: What gets measured gets managed. Let’s create a dashboard tracking the ratio of dystopian-to-optimistic content across platforms. Make studios compete for higher scores on the “Abundance Index,” similar to how they now tout diversity metrics.

3. Invest in Exponential Storytelling: Those who want to steer towards a hopeful, compelling, and abundant future for humanity should back productions that showcase how exponential technologies solve humanity’s grand challenges.

4. Leverage AI for Narrative Transformation: Today’s AI systems can analyze story structures and help writers craft compelling narratives around hope, innovation, and human potential. Let’s use these tools to create the next generation of world-building.

For those of you who don’t know me, I teach a class on the history of the digital future. I am finishing a book on the topic as well. So I think I can speak with some authority in saying that there has not been a time in recent memory when the future was quite so unclear as it is right now.

That existential uncertainty comes from two places. (1) We don’t know what generative AI will mean for the types of work you all are setting out to specialize in. And (2) we don’t know what the future of our political system will be.

Piece of advice #2: Find your voice. Never stop finding your voice.

Y’know what most bums me out about generative AI products like ChatGPT? They make everyone sound the same. This is baked into the product itself — it is, at base, a guess-the-next-word engine, a cliche-generator. And whether you think it’s the future or you thinks it’s a hype bubble, it sure seems like we’re going to be awash in the stuff for the next few years.

I consider Harry Law my lead AGI reporter, if such a thing could exist. It’s important we keep debating AGI and ASI because it has ramifications on the global economy and society as a whole. If one day, AI were to become sentient, self-motivated and awaken from the ghost in the machine what would it attempt to do?

The upshot is that the bus is on the road, but its steering is still being worked out. AI firms feel they need to create ever-more capable AI to avoid being left behind by the competition domestically and internationally, while at the same time seeking to understand those systems for safety and policy reasons. This drive is a defining feature of the current moment, as labs must satisfy investors and regulators that AGI is both inevitable and controllable.

Fifteen years ago, Public Benefit Corporations (PBCs) didn’t exist. Today, they have become a popular legal structure for some of the biggest tech companies in the world.

In the 200+ year history of U.S. corporate law, PBCs are a recent legal invention. The first state to pass PBC legislation was Maryland in 2010. Today, 41 states (and the District of Columbia) have laws that enable PBCs.

Unlike traditional corporate structures like C-Corps and S-Corps, which are designed to maximize shareholder value, PBCs promise an alignment between profit and a defined public benefit to society.

PBCs have been making news recently, with OpenAI’s recent decision to convert its for-profit business to a PBC controlled by a nonprofit parent entity.

Becoming a PBC has many benefits:

• Mission alignment: By legally embedding its social mission into its company’s DNA, a PBC structure can help tech firms stay focused on long-term societal impact.
• Public goodwill: A PBC structure can lead to enhanced consumer, employee, and investor trust in the brand. For AI companies responsible for the development of disruptive technologies, becoming a PBC is a step (though a small one) in assuaging the public that those in power have broader societal concerns in mind.
• Greater transparency: PBCs are required to adhere to regular and transparent reporting requirements. However, these requirements do not require AI companies to reveal how their AI algorithms work (a complaint that many have raised). It’s unclear if a shift in legal structure will lead to the type of transparency critics seek.

What happens to a society when intelligence itself becomes a commodity? That is the question posed throughout the National Academy of Sciences 2025 report, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work. The work is not prophecy, nor should it be mistaken for one of Silicon Valley’s breathless manifestos. It is, rather, a sober, meticulous reckoning with the ambiguous, disquieting, and often paradoxical forces unleashed by the rise of AI. Strategic, unvarnished, and disturbingly persuasive.

The authors are not alarmists, but their findings demand our attention. The committee, featuring renowned researchers such as Erik Brynjolfsson, David Autor, Tom Mitchell, and others remind us that AI, as a general-purpose technology, joins the ranks of electricity and the steam engine, tools that did not merely make us faster but rewrote the coordinates of productivity.

ITDF Center Director Lee Rainie spoke recently at the Northeast Florida Library Information Network about the future of libraries.

His talk covered two studies released by the Center this spring: one about the universe of large language model users like ChatGPT and Claude, and the other covering the report about being human in the next decade.