About
Why Essence of Humanity
The word ‘essence’ carries a risk. It can sound like something settled — a fixed inheritance, guaranteed by birth, requiring only protection. We mean something closer to its opposite.
Being human is a practice. The essence we speak of is alive, dynamic, capable of deepening through attention and effort — or of withering through neglect. It can lie largely dormant across an entire lifetime, or it can be progressively awakened. What we fail to cultivate, we gradually cease to inhabit.
Consider the phrase itself: human being. Two words in permanent tension. Human: the biological creature,
the nervous system, the mortal animal embedded in nature and time. Being: consciousness, presence,
awareness that knows itself, the capacity to stand in wonder before its own existence. The human being is an extraordinary hybrid — and the meeting point between those two dimensions is where everything interesting happens.
The depths of that meeting point are largely unexplored. Most of us live in the shallows. We process,produce, react, achieve — and in the midst of all that doing, the vast inner landscape goes uninhabited. AI has not created this situation. But its arrival has made the cost of it visible.
The essence can wither. It can also be awakened.
That is the opportunity this moment offers. Every question about what AI reveals about us is, beneath the surface, a question about what remains undiscovered in us. The project bearing that name is dedicated to the discovery.
The danger of AI is that it debases our understanding of ourselves, because we compare ourselves now with an eviscerated simulacrum. Eviscerated is a good word — among the many things machines don’t have is viscera. They don’t have bodies, and they don’t have the interiority that goes with embodiment. We look into this mirror and think: “I see, so that’s what we are.” But we are not. It mistakes a two-dimensional caricature for the deep four-dimensional flesh and blood and soul that a human being is..
What we are here to do
I. Map
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse varius enim in eros elementum tristique. Duis cursus, mi quis viverra ornare, eros dolor interdum nulla, ut commodo diam libero vitae erat. Aenean faucibus nibh et justo cursus id rutrum lorem imperdiet. Nunc ut sem vitae risus tristique posuere.
II. Cultivate
Translate that map into educational practice. Design and pilot pedagogical programmes that cultivate the full depth of human capacities in schools— beginning with pilots in Portugal, the United Kingdom, India, and the United States. Develop resources for educators who understand that what schools form is more important than what they measure.
III. Shift
Move the global conversation from defending human distinctiveness to actively awakening human depth —through a public Knowledge Hub, cross-disciplinary convenings, policy partnerships, and a growing coalition of educators, researchers, and policymakers united around oneconviction: that the deepest response to artificial intelligence is a more fully inhabited humanity.
Essence of Humanity begins with the human being.
Two responses have shaped the public conversation so far. One says: embrace it, integrate it, use it well. The other says: resist it, regulate it, protect what is ours. Both are focused on the machine. Both are, in their own way, using it as a mirror that they hold at arm’s length — looking at its reflection rather than into their own.
There is a third response, and it begins not with the machine but with a genuine inquiry into ourselves. Into the capacities we have inherited as human beings and systematically undervalued. Into the dimensions of our existence — presence, embodied knowing, moral depth, genuine encounter, the slow transformation of the self — that flourish only through deliberate cultivation, and that our speed-driven, output-measuring, optimisation-obsessed world has given us little reason to tend.
AI makes those neglected territories visible. It performs the outer surface of human activity with astonishing fluency, and in doing so, it clears the ground for a different question: what lies beneath that surface? What have we been too busy to inhabit? What could we become, if we finally turned our attention there?
This is an invitation.
To go deeper into being human than efficiency has ever required.
Shai Tubali, PhD · Co-founder
The question at the heart of Essence of Humanity — what does it mean to be fully human? — has been the animating question of Shai Tubali’s life. He has pursued it across three decades of philosophical inquiry, contemplative practice, and direct engagement with human consciousness, long before artificial intelligence made it urgent for everyone else.
It was his postdoctoral research on the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti’s approach to AI that became the ignition point of this project. Krishnamurti’s question — if the machine can do everything we can do, then what are you? — landed differently in 2022, as large language models made its provocation suddenly, viscerally plausible. That urgency, felt personally and philosophically at once, became the Essence of Humanity.
Shai holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Leeds, where his research on transformative philosophical dialogue was published by Springer Nature. He is currently a doctoral researcher at the UCL Institute of Education, where his project — Educating the Irreplicable Mind — develops the Atlas of Human Capacities as both a scholarly framework and an educational practice, supported by UNESCO.
He is the author of more than twenty books translated into thirteen languages, and the creator of the Big Think series How Not to Become Like AI. Through The Human Practice, a philosophy and path developed over three decades, he brings together philosophical rigour, scientific grounding, and direct experiential depth as a living response to the question this project poses.
José Neves · Co-founder
José Neves is a Portuguese entrepreneur who built Farfetch, one of the most significant global technology platforms of his generation — and who arrived, through that experience of building at the frontier of the digital world, at the same question that drives this project: what must we cultivate in ourselves so that the human being is genuinely present in the world the machine is building?
Through the José Neves Foundation, he has worked for years to transform Portugal into a knowledge society, investing in education and human development as the true ground of a country’s future. Co-founding the Alaya Foundation with Shai Tubali was the extension of that commitment into a deeper register: technology must serve human depth. José Neves brings to this work not only the capacity to act at global scale, but the perspective of someone who has looked into the mirror that technology holds up — and chosen to invest in what it reflects back.
Essence of Humanity is an initiative of the Alaya Foundation
The Alaya Foundation was co-founded by Shai Tubali and José Neves from a shared conviction: that the age of artificial intelligence demands more than better technology. It demands a deeper understanding of what we are, and a deliberate commitment to cultivating the capacities through which a human life becomes conscious, meaningful, free, and fully inhabited.
The Foundation works across two interconnected arms: the Essence of Humanity initiative, devoted to research, education, and public knowledge; and the development of AI technologies designed to nurture rather than erode human consciousness — tools that orient toward the depth of the person rather than the efficiency of the task.
Alaya — from the Sanskrit, meaning abode or dwelling place — names the foundation’s governing belief: that what most needs cultivating in this age is the interior ground from which a meaningful human life arises. The being shore, in the language of the Atlas. The place from which everything else becomes possible.
Three things add most to the meaning of life: belonging in a community of people who share their lives, trust and support one another; belonging in nature, from which most of us have been ripped out; and belonging in a sense of a divine or sacred cosmos. All these things are relational, must be personally experienced, and remain implicit if they are not to be debased. They are also what no AI can give us.