Knowledge Hub
Essence of Humanity is simultaneously a research project, a philosophical practice, and a living public space. The Knowledge Hub is where the ongoing inquiry lives — in conversation with thinkers, educators, and researchers who are grappling seriously with what it means to be human in an age of cognitive-simulating machines.
We project human-like qualities onto AI systems, and we see the algorithms in ourselves — we see ourselves through the lens of the things we create. The idea that this is the kind of thing we are is very diminishing of the human condition. If we see ourselves as embodied algorithms, we are licensed to throw away almost all of the interesting stuff that makes us who we are.
Read
Essays and Blog
Reflective writing on philosophy, consciousness, AI, and education — in the voice of the inquiry, including guest contributions from writers, educators, and thinkers pursuing their own version of it.
Big Think Series
How Not to Become Like AI
A year long series exploring what it means to remain fully human in an age of artificial minds — through encounter with thinkers who have spent their lives attending to what is most irreducible about consciousness, meaning, relation, and the examined life.
Academic Papers
Peer-reviewed and working papers from the UCL doctoral research and related scholarship, including the full Atlas methodology, the Reflexive Thematic Analysis across twenty-four thinkers, and philosophical papers on AI, consciousness, and the aims of education.
Expert Interviews
Long-form conversations with the philosophers, neuroscientists, educators, and AI researchers whose work grounds the Atlas. These are inquiries into the human — what it is, what it requires, what it risks losing. Featuring Christof Koch, Anil Seth, Gert Biesta, Iain McGilchrist, Federico Faggin, Sven Nyholm, Shannon Vallor, Thomas Metzinger, Paul Standish, and others.
Listen & Watch
Video essays
Short films from Shai Tubali, exploring the questions and capacities at the heart of the inquiry — the Atlas, the Two Rivers, the human capacities that AI is making most urgent to cultivate. Some appear here first; some are drawn from the YouTube channel.
Audio Moments
Distilled excerpts from interviews — a single turning, a single insight, a moment where something essential becomes clear. For the walk, the pause, the space between tasks where a question can actually land.
Podcasts
Conversations in which Shai Tubali has explored the themes of Essence of Humanity across a range of shows and platforms, from philosophy of mind to education to the contemplative dimensions of human consciousness.
Q&A
Real questions from readers, students, and educators, answered with the same depth the inquiry demands. A continuing conversation, not a FAQ.
There is something shapeless and formless at the bottom of every conscious experience — the feeling of being alive. It is worth dwelling on, meditating on, paying attention to, exploring the nature of that phenomenology. It paints us back into nature, an antidote to the over-rationalisation and computationalisation of the mind that interactions with AI tempt us into.