Beyond familiar concerns such as regulation or job displacement, what challenges do current AI systems raise for human existence, identity, or lived experience?

That’s a big one. I think the biggest challenge we encounter is that we will lose the capacity and the opportunity to take charge of our own decisions and our own will. More and more, we will potentially let it be done by AI — which basically means being done by someone else outside of ourselves. And then we lose the capacity to discern what is really ours — the capacity to make decisions, to decide for ourselves.

What deeper questions about human life might arise as AI takes over activities that were previously carried out by humans?

I’m not sure if life itself is the issue. But I would say that our ability to reason for ourselves, to take a stance on a specific situation, our ability to distinguish between fact and fiction — those are issues we are already seeing happening. And if you take that to an extreme, we become much more spectators of our own lives than the actors of our own lives.

How might we find ourselves in that situation — where we no longer take charge of our own decisions?

There is a very concerning development at the moment. We see AI being used and applied for the sake of AI itself. It becomes the goal, instead of a means for a specific issue. You see this at the level of governments all over the world, coming up with these strategies about what I call AI first. The idea is that you need to use AI, based on the feeling that all other governments are doing the same. This feeling of missing out. And then AI becomes the goal in itself, no longer a means for a well-formulated and understood issue.

The more we do that, the more we become dependent on mediated interactions and mediated decisions with these systems — to an extent that we will not be able to take decisions anymore without the mediation. I read recently from some psychologists that children in secondary school are already feeling very uncomfortable whenever they have to write something without the support of AI. All that type of dependency, taken to an extreme, is a real concern.

Here in Sweden, the government just recently issued a requirement for public services and civil organisations to use AI within the next year, and to report back to the government on how they are using it. And there is very little in that directive that asks why they are doing this. Even at the level of public service, the reasoning is much more that you have to use AI, and not so much asking yourself what for.

So what you are saying, if I understand correctly, is that it is not AI itself that reshapes what it means to be human — it is that humans might delegate their decisions to AI?

AI is a technology we develop. It is an artifact, and in itself it will not really do anything. It is much more about what we are using it for, and how we are using it, and how we are allowing the mediation of our interactions with these systems. AI itself, as I also say in the book, is a misnomer — maybe even an empty signifier. We are calling everything and anything AI, and at a certain moment it doesn’t have any meaning anymore. But what we are seeing very clearly is that we are increasingly dependent on the mediation of interactions and decisions using some type of artificial system.

In contemporary philosophy of AI, discussions of human distinctiveness often focus on identifying what capacities machines lack. How should we approach human distinctiveness in this context?

I’m not really sure we should approach this from the idea of human distinctiveness at all — because then we are already assuming that AI has any way to compare with us, and then we have to look at how we are different.

I think it’s more a matter of understanding that what you are building is a problem-solving system — a system that can address a very specific type of human intelligence: what I would call the logical-mathematical approach. Human intelligence is much more than solving problems. It is much more than only the logical-mathematical type of capabilities. And even within that specific part of human intelligence, AI is being developed in a very specific approach.

The current approach assumes that by identifying patterns in a set of data — which is basically a set of results of previous human actions — we can somehow reconstruct the reasoning that humans took. All of this is very limited. It limits the type of intelligence we are looking at, and the approach to that specific type of intelligence.

Rather than comparing ourselves with what AI can or cannot do, we need to really understand what makes us human. And it is nothing new. In the Renaissance, philosophers were comparing human intelligence to clocks. They have been comparing intelligence to water pipes and water mechanics. The last thing we did was to compare our intelligence to computing. We are always trying to compare ourselves to our latest technology — instead of realising that this technology is here only, and necessarily, because of our own capacity to create it.

So in that sense, we are not really facing two kinds of intelligence. AI is more like a simulation of certain branches of human capacity?

I wouldn’t even say it’s a simulation. It’s an alternative to some of our types of intelligence.

The AI field started with the idea that we would be able to understand human intelligence better if we could build artificial models of what we understood of intelligence. That’s what came in with the Dartmouth Workshop of 1956, and what Turing claimed we could do. We started the AI field as something that would simulate human intelligence, as a means to understanding that intelligence. Nowadays we are building systems with the capacity to act directly, to intervene in the world in which they operate. And what is relevant for an active system is not necessarily the same as what we need from a simulated one. So we again change the understanding of what we mean by AI — to mean something different than the original purpose.

You’ve written about AI as a mirror of human thinking — Shannon Vallor’s phrase. What becomes visible through this mirroring?

The AI mirror, as Shannon says in her book, is the idea that we build something in our own likeness, and then we fall in love with that likeness. That is fundamental — not only for AI, but for human curiosity and for science in general. Trying to understand what makes us. What we can change, what we can improve, what we can take away — and what still remains as being humanity.

I think this is basic human intelligence: the curiosity that drives us forward, trying to build things that look like us. It starts in childhood. When kids play with dolls, or even with stones, pretending the stone is a child or another person — those are exactly the ways we have to understand ourselves: by experimenting. And AI, if anything, is one of such experiments. What can we build that decides like us?

I hope this comparison will give us a better understanding of ourselves — an understanding of what is in us that is not in the mirror. And it is also important to understand the difference: the image in a mirror will never be the reality itself. That is an important way of looking at AI.

When we consider AI systems that take over or imitate forms of human thinking and judgment, which human capacities require renewed attention or active cultivation today?

I would say the capacity to question ourselves and to remain curious — to remain alert to what’s happening, what the consequences are, to try to extrapolate from what’s happening to other dimensions. Not so much the doing itself, but the capacity to reflect on what we are doing, why we are doing it, and what if we would do something different? Those are the core capabilities moving forward.

The what if. Why does it matter?

Because it is only when we ask ourselves what if that we can really discover alternatives. If we accept things as they are, we are not prepared to find the differences. Science is basically the capacity to ask what if. What if I throw the ball out of the tower? What if I move this from one place to another? What if I count things in one way or another? Science has always been moved forward by what if.

Do you feel this capacity is losing depth in human practice?

I don’t think it’s losing depth. If anything, we will need to go even further in the what if — perhaps at higher levels of abstraction — exactly because we have now created machines which can analyse what ifs very quickly.

What happens to this capacity when it is not actively practised?

That is the worry. If we don’t practise it, we will start giving up on it. This is exactly what is important, moving forward — in terms of education and the new generations, to cultivate the capacity for creativity and reflection. If we don’t do that, then like many of our other capabilities, we forget them very quickly. If we don’t use the muscles we have, they atrophy. If we don’t use these mental muscles, they might atrophy as well. That would be a loss for all of us.

Might that happen as a result of over-reliance on AI?

It could. Or, on the other hand, relying on AI for some of the tasks we currently do could potentially liberate us to have more time for the reflective and the what if. In the same way that if I don’t need to calculate the square root by hand, I have more time to look at the mathematical equations I’m working on. It could go that way. But we need to be very careful and very conscious of keeping a finger on what’s happening.

You make an intriguing point in the book about how social behaviour is the foundation of our intelligence.

That is actually not mine. It comes from African and other non-Western philosophies. The concept of Ubuntu, which comes from African philosophy, says exactly this: Ubuntu means I am because we are. That’s a fundamentally different understanding of the world from our own Cartesian one — I think, therefore I am. In the West, we put reason first, and then identity. Other cultures put the collective and the social first, and identity emerges from that. You see how completely opposite they are.

In the book I try to build on those concepts, to see the absurdity of focusing on thinking as the core function of our existence.

So the picture of AI as a lone thinker — a kind of lone wolf — is itself the problem?

Yes. And that is exactly why the capacity to question ourselves is so important. The willingness and necessity of questioning ourselves is what probably makes us stand apart from animals — and maybe also from AI.

How is that capacity actually cultivated in human life?

Through curiosity. Through the willingness to try further than we think we are able. And through engaging with others. Because, as I say later in the book, super-intelligence is already here. It is the collective intelligence of all of us. We are only able to achieve this super-intelligence by interacting with each other.

If we really want the super-intelligence that big tech is promising us, we had better look at our collective capability to work together, to be more than what each of us is. That is what makes us move forward — even as some parts of what we consider intelligence today might be replaced by machines. It is exactly by cultivating our capacity to interact with each other, to contribute to each other, to remain curious and willing to go further than the borders we perceive.

In a sense, we are waiting for a super-intelligence that would be an awakening of our own dormant awareness of what we already are.

Yes. And I think the current understanding of super-intelligence is just a commercial gimmick. Big tech companies have got to somewhere near the limits of what they can do with LLMs and transformers. So if they can keep us hooked on the idea that they are going to use these tools to generate super-intelligence, we keep investing in them. It is a very down-to-earth, very simplistic, but very real understanding of what is happening. They need to keep their own importance and their own investment coming. So they promise something we know they will not be able to do — but no one else will either.

Super-intelligence is not, by definition, one being more intelligent than we are. Together, we are more intelligent than any of us is. If we can build tools that extend and awaken the capabilities we have together, that is what we should be looking at. That ChatGPT will suddenly solve all our problems — that is a lost battle.

That is a striking claim, from someone with your depth of expertise in the field.

We need someone — I hope some kids soon — who will point out that the emperor has no clothes. Because that is what it is. And if we keep putting more and more excitement around it, we forget to notice that the emperor has no clothes. Many of those who are building these things do not have a background of forty years in AI. Many of them do not have a background in AI at all — and certainly not in the philosophy of the field. Maybe they should go back to school.

Is there anything you feel is missing from the discussion — anything I haven’t asked that would be important?

One thing I was just remembering. One of the first definitions of AI I used — that many people used — is the definition that says AI is what AI cannot do. Fifty years ago, calculating a square root automatically was a sign of intelligence. Now that any calculator can do it, it is not really AI anymore. That machines can play chess is not AI anymore. That machines can find routes on maps is not AI anymore. All of this was part of the discipline for many years. Even machine learning — nowadays people are saying, oh, that is not AI anymore, it is just pattern matching.

On one hand, this is a kind of limitation of AI. On the other, it is exactly the capability we have to move forward. Once we solve a problem, it is no longer something we find very intelligent — because we know how to do it.

Which means, perhaps, that we understand ourselves more deeply through what AI cannot yet do.

Exactly. And that is why I say it keeps moving forward. Because it is what AI cannot do yet. And that will move again next time.

1. We believe that AI is the most clarifying event in human history – not because of what it can do, but because of what it reveals about all that is left undeveloped in us: the breadth and richness of our humanity that we can no longer afford to ignore.

2. We believe that the question AI forces upon us – what does it truly mean to be human? – is not a threat to be managed through regulation, integration, or resistance, but an invitation to be answered with greater depth and honesty than ever before.

3. We believe that humanness is not a fixed inheritance, guaranteed by nature and requiring only protection. It is a living potential, practice-dependent and educable – and what we fail to cultivate, we will gradually cease to be.

4. We believe that the full measure of what it means to be human extends far beyond cognitive performance – into the embodied, the relational, the contemplative, and the dimensions of consciousness that no machine can enter because they are not products of processing but of presence.

5. We believe that mapping these capacities rigorously and honestly – through the finest and most diverse minds of our generation, across cultures, disciplines, and ways of knowing – is one of the most important tasks of our time.

6. We believe that our children deserve an education oriented toward what makes a human life worth living, not toward tasks that machines will soon perform better than any person alive today.

7. We believe that genuine AI literacy means knowing which capacities to cultivate and keep alive – not merely how to use AI critically or productively – and that this knowledge is a form of preventive medicine for the human soul.

8. We believe that many of the capacities most worth cultivating are immeasurable, non-instrumental, and resistant to optimization – and that honoring them as such is itself a radical act in an AI-saturated world.

9. We believe that the deepest ethical response to this moment is not to guard the borders of our humanity but to finally inhabit it fully – to become, with urgency and with care, what we have always been capable of being.

10. We ask not what machines can never do. We ask what humans must never stop doing – and we dedicate our work to keeping that alive through practices, orientations, and inquiry that honor the non-mechanized spirit of human existence.

I. Something Has Changed

You feel it. Most of us do, even if we haven’t found the words for it yet.

Something fundamental has shifted — not just in technology or the job market, but in something closer to home. In the way we understand ourselves. In the question subtly gathering force at the back of our minds: if a machine can think, write, create, reason, and hold a conversation — what exactly is left that is distinctly, irreplaceably human?

This is not a question for philosophers alone. It is your question. It is ours. And the fact that we are all asking it at the same time, whether we know it or not, is itself one of the most significant moments in human history.

The previous chapters of the digital revolution — the Internet, social media, smartphones — changed how we live. This chapter is different. For the first time, a machine aspires to do what we have always believed was uniquely ours: to think, to understand, to create meaning. And in doing so, it forces us to ask what meaning actually is. What thinking actually is. What we actually are.

II. The Answers We Have Been Given

Two kinds of responses have dominated the conversation so far, and neither reaches far enough.

The first says: embrace it. Integrate AI into everything. Use it faster, use it better, stay ahead of it. This response treats AI as an upgrade — a more powerful tool in our already tool-saturated lives. It never stops to ask what we might be losing in the process, or what kind of human beings we are gradually becoming.

The second says: resist it. Protect what is human. Guard our cognitive abilities from erosion. This response senses that something precious is at stake — and it is right. But it is still looking in the wrong direction. It tries to protect what we already are, rather than asking what we could become.

Both responses share the same blind spot: they focus on the machine, either its wonders or its dangers. What we need is to turn our gaze toward ourselves.

The deeper possibility AI opens up is this: that it will expose how far we have been living below our potential as human beings. The capacities that make us most fully alive — the ability to be genuinely present to another person, the courage to sit with uncertainty and let it open into wisdom, the experience of meaning that transforms rather than merely comforts, the felt sense of belonging to the living world rather than standing apart from it as a rational observer, the quality of attention that we can actually govern and direct rather than surrender to every passing stimulus — these have been neglected for so long that we have almost forgotten they exist.

III. What AI Is Really Showing Us

Think of the concern many people share: that AI will weaken our ability to think critically, to concentrate, to reason for ourselves.

These capacities were already fragile before AI arrived. We were already distracted, already dependent on shortcuts, already outsourcing our attention and judgment to systems that rewarded speed over depth. When we worry that AI will erode our critical thinking or our creativity, something real is being sensed — but the worry deserves a more honest framing. Many of these capacities were never widely or deeply cultivated to begin with. What feels like loss is closer to recognition: a sudden clarity about what was always missing.

This is what makes AI so clarifying, and so uncomfortable. It walks into the neglected rooms of our inner lives and makes them impossible to ignore any longer. And it raises a question that cuts even deeper: are we actually being what we claim is our unquestionable human nature? Are we genuinely curious, genuinely present, genuinely reflective — or have we been coasting on the assumption that these capacities are simply ours by birthright, requiring no cultivation at all?

There is a kind of intellectual laziness that responds to AI by cataloguing everything machines will never be able to do — as though the bare fact of human exceptionalism were sufficient, and the work of actually becoming exceptional were someone else’s concern. This leaves us dangerously unprepared. Because what truly matters is not the fact of our difference from machines, but whether we are living as though that difference means something.

What makes a human being irreplaceable has nothing to do with thinking faster or remembering more. It begins with the capacity for genuine presence. For love that transforms. For the desire to understand driven by wonder rather than utility. For perception that meets the world directly, unfiltered by habit and assumption. For the encounter with another person or idea that genuinely changes us, rather than merely adding to what we already know. For the experience of being alive — fully, consciously, with depth and with freedom. These are things a machine cannot simulate in any way that matters — and things we ourselves have barely begun to explore.

IV. Mapping the Territory: The Atlas of Human Capacities

The Essence of Humanity is a research-supported project with a clear purpose: to build a carefully designed atlas of human capacities through which individuals, organizations, and educational systems can confidently navigate the age of intelligent machines — not only by protecting our humanness, but by deepening it in ways that make us meaningfully distinct.

We use the word atlas deliberately. An atlas is a living map, revised as we explore further, expanded as we discover new territory. It has regions that are well-charted and regions that remain largely unknown. And crucially, the act of mapmaking is itself a human act — one that no machine can perform in our place, because it requires not just coordinates but judgment, meaning, and the wisdom to know what deserves to be named.

Human capacities, as we understand them, are relatively enduring human powers and potentials through which we come into contact with the world — perceiving and interpreting it, making sense of it, responding to it, and participating in shaping it. More than skills to be trained, they are dimensions of being human that either deepen through attention and practice, or steadily wither through neglect.

Among the capacities this atlas charts: the desire to learn for its own sake, for the pure love of understanding. The ability to achieve something genuinely meaningful — to struggle, to persist, and to be changed by what we accomplish. The courage to live with unpredictability rather than escaping it. The quiet practice of turning awareness back on oneself — listening to one’s own inner life with honesty and care. The fullness of lived subjective experience: what it is actually like to be here, to feel, to perceive, to wonder. The ability to govern one’s own attention — to choose, freely and deliberately, where awareness rests — rather than surrendering it to whatever is loudest or most urgent. The sense of belonging to the living world, to nature, to something larger than the self that thinks and achieves and competes. The identity that runs deeper than what we do or what we know — the experience of simply being, prior to all roles and expertise and social performance.

The atlas reaches further still, into territory that is harder to name but no less real. The capacity to ask what does not yet have an answer — to inhabit a question with patience and genuine openness, letting it deepen rather than rushing it toward resolution. The speculative imagination that asks what if, that envisions what does not yet exist and in doing so participates in bringing it into being. Understanding that moves through pattern and resonance and listening rather than through sequential argument — the kind of knowing that arrives whole rather than step by step. The direct perception of reality that precedes interpretation: seeing freshly, without the film of assumption and memory that usually stands between us and the world. The capacity to be genuinely transformed by encounter — with a person, an idea, a work of art, a moment of beauty — rather than merely processing it as information. The intelligence of the heart: that direct, recognitive knowing that does not reason its way to truth but remembers it, feels it as a certainty in the body before the mind has caught up. And beneath all of these, available in the deepest stillness: pure awareness itself, consciousness prior to its contents, the silent ground from which all human experience arises and to which it returns.

These are the regions where the most important human exploration is yet to come. And they are also, not coincidentally, the regions that no machine can enter — because they are not the products of processing, but of presence.

V. The Voices That Build the Map

A map this ambitious cannot be drawn by one hand. The meaning of humanness in the age of AI is humanity’s question — and it must be answered by humanity in its full diversity.

The Essence of Humanity brings together the finest minds of our generation across a wide range of disciplines: philosophers of mind, philosophers of AI, AI ethicists, neuroscientists, computer scientists, AI engineers and developers, philosophers of education, educators, and those rare thinkers who combine contemplative depth with genuine understanding of artificial intelligence. What unites them is not agreement on every question, but the seriousness with which they take the question itself.

We are particularly committed to voices that Western academic discourse has too often excluded: non-Western traditions, wisdom held outside institutions, ways of knowing that resist reduction to measurable outputs. To truly encompass the full measure of this challenge, we must learn from each other across every border that divides us.

VI. Beginning With Our Children

If there is one place where this work becomes most urgent, most concrete, and most consequential, it is in our schools.

A child sitting in a classroom today is being prepared, above all, for tasks that machines will perform better than any human within her lifetime. She is being trained to memorize, to process, to produce output efficiently. She is not being taught what it means to be present. To make meaning. To inhabit a question. To encounter another human being with genuine depth. To exist as a free subject in a world she did not choose.

Education was always meant to be the space where human beings are formed — not only trained or informed, but genuinely shaped into their fullest selves. What we have built instead are systems that optimize for performance. And now AI can outperform those systems at their own game.

The Essence of Humanity is committed above all to preparing children for an AI-saturated world — going far beyond the future of work or the acquisition of skills, toward knowing which capacities they should cultivate most of all. An education worthy of this moment teaches young people not just how to use AI intelligently and critically, but why there are things worth doing for themselves — things that cannot be outsourced without losing something that goes to the heart of what a human life is.

The struggle of writing a genuine thought. The satisfaction of understanding something deeply. The experience of meaning that comes from real effort, real presence, real engagement with the world. These are not luxuries, but the substance of a life worth living.

VII. What We Are Here To Do

The Essence of Humanity is a response to possibility — not to fear.

We provide a carefully designed map alongside practices and orientations to serve individuals, organizations, and educational systems. We ask hard questions and resist easy answers. We develop ways of cultivating human capacities that honor their depth — not as programs to be optimized, but as living dimensions of a human being that require care, attention, and the courage to keep growing.

We gather scientists and philosophers, educators and contemplatives, engineers and poets. We draw on rigorous research and on the kind of wisdom that has always lived beyond the reach of research. We hold these voices in genuine dialogue — not to produce consensus, but to draw a map that is faithful to the full range of what human beings are.

What is most deeply human in us is a living potential, not a fixed inheritance — and like all living things, it either deepens through practice and attention or diminishes through neglect.

AI holds a mirror up to us — and what it reflects back is an invitation to finally become what we have always had the potential to be. The Essence of Humanity exists to answer that invitation, for each of us, and for the generations who will inherit the world we are now building.

We invite you to join us.

About the Founder

Shai Tubali, PhD, is a philosopher, author, and human transformation teacher whose work stands at the intersection of rigorous academic inquiry and two decades of practice in the field of consciousness and inner development.

He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Leeds and a postdoctoral fellowship in AI and meaning in life. He is currently a researcher at University College London, where his work focuses on AI and education. His academic research synthesizes philosophy, social sciences, and deep conversations with leading thinkers across disciplines — from neuroscientists and AI engineers to philosophers of mind and educators.

At the same time, Shai brings to this work something that research alone cannot supply: twenty years of direct engagement with human transformation, working with thousands of people across the world as a teacher and guide in the development of consciousness. It is this rare combination — philosophical rigor, scientific grounding, and lived experiential depth — that gives the Essence of Humanity project its distinctive character.

The Essence of Humanity is his attempt to bring both worlds to bear on the most important question of our time: what does it mean to be human, and how do we cultivate that humanity, in the age of artificial intelligence.