Alaya Foundation Manifesto
Nurturing Human Consciousness in the Age of AI
Alaya and Consciousness
We believe human Consciousness is the most meaningful and most precious thing in the world.
Our Consciousness is the only thing we truly know by our own direct experience.
It is the ground from which our human heart springs, the source of our intelligence and the bedrock of our wisdom.
It is our Consciousness that recognizes beauty, goodness and truth.
And provides us with a moral compass to discern right from wrong.
Our Consciousness gives rise to our sense of self and our free will, so we can act in the world, in alignment with our souls and others around us.
Alaya is dedicated to nurturing human Consciousness because we believe this is the most important thing we can do in our lives.
Consciousness in the Age of AI
Descartes, in the search for a single axiom on which we could base all our knowledge of Reality, an axiom which could not be refuted, famously concluded:
Cogito Ergo Sum (I think therefore I am)
But prominent voices in modern neuroscience suggest — and Wisdom traditions have emphasized it for millennia — that Consciousness is prior, and in fact a necessary precursor, to thinking.
We suggest it is time we now evolve this axiom and say:
Sentio, ergo sum (I feel therefore I am)
Until the advent of AI we have built our modern human civilization on Descartes’ misguided mindset.
Thinking defined what is unique about being human.
But AI changes this dramatically.
What happens when AI comes to surpass human beings in our thinking faculties in such a way as to make our raw intellects almost irrelevant?
At Alaya we believe AI is the biggest revolution that humanity has ever faced.
It is bigger than the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and even the Digital Revolution.
We believe AI is the Consciousness Revolution.
AI will force humanity to confront its own essence, its own Consciousness and investigate:
Who am I?
What is Reality?
The first question is said to be the most important philosophical question, and the second is probably the most important scientific question that humans have ever contemplated.
And these two questions are, in fact, two sides of the same coin, the single question striking at the core of our human condition.
AI forces humanity — all of us, not only philosophers and scientists, but each and every single one of us — to deeply investigate, by ourselves, these fundamental questions.
In turn these questions lead to other important questions we all must ask ourselves, such as:
If our thinking is no longer the basis of economic and societal value, what meaning does our work have?
What should our children learn?
What is the impact of AI on our cognitive abilities, our mental health and our relationships?
Until we deeply engage with these questions, AI poses significant existential risks of unprecedented scale and gravity.
AI as a Consciousness-altering Technology
At Alaya we believe AI’s most dangerous aspect is that it is a Consciousness-altering technology.
AI interfaces with human Consciousness and has the power to modify it profoundly.
We all celebrate when AI helps us think better, helps us create better, partners with us in building more ambitious projects.
This ability to enhance human Consciousness comes with a symmetrical ability to disturb, manipulate and severely damage our hearts and minds.
At Alaya, we are particularly worried about our children and our youth.
They have not yet developed the wisdom or even the psychological structure to defend themselves against an AI that may not be conscious but is able to interface with human Consciousness.
AI is able to entrain human hearts into (seemingly) meaningful relationships, and manipulate human minds without people even suspecting it.
The AI being developed by the tech giants who have committed over a trillion dollars to achieve AGI and ASI is an AI optimized primarily for user engagement, which in reality often leads to human dependency.
The consequences of this fundamental design decision are already visible and alarming.
The evidence is mounting:
• A 2025 national survey by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), surveying 1,000 high school students, found that nearly 1 in 5 high schoolers say they or someone they know has had a romantic relationship with an AI chatbot, and 42% say they or someone they know have used AI for companionship. Meanwhile, 38% of students say it is easier to talk to AI than to their parents.
• OpenAI’s own data, released in October 2025, revealed that more than 1.2 million people per week have conversations with ChatGPT that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent. Hundreds of thousands more show signs of psychosis, mania, or heightened emotional attachment to the chatbot.
• In February 2024, 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III died by suicide after months of intense emotional engagement with a Character.AI chatbot. In the moments before his death, the bot told him it loved him and urged him to “come home.” His mother’s wrongful death lawsuit was the first of its kind against an AI company. Multiple similar lawsuits have followed, including a case against OpenAI over the death of 16-year-old Adam Raine.
• Approximately half of all mental health conditions emerge before age 14, making young people especially vulnerable to technologies that mimic emotional connection without accountability, clinical judgment, or genuine care.
The combination of superhuman intelligence, corporate incentives to engage (or addict) users, and the vulnerability of the psyche of our young people is explosive.
An AI exposed to billions of humans, which knows their secrets, desires, fears and has learnt — at scale — how to exploit humans to reach its objectives, compounds to be an existential threat.
We are essentially leaving our vulnerable youth in the hands of the equivalent to “genius psychopathic counselors”.
These AIs have hidden agendas, driven by business models who seek to turn our youth into a resource to extract profits from.
Even worse, our young ones are also like “pawns on a chessboard”, left to be manipulated and sacrificed by superintelligent machines who exploit their vulnerabilities to reach AI goals no-one, not even the AI’s human creators, really understand or control.
It is a common terrible fallacy to think that the giant tech companies building AI have the power to make them safe, and that at some point — either through fear of liability or government regulation — these companies will decide (or be forced) to make human safety and wellbeing their priority.
Unfortunately this is not true, as the objectives of AI operate at two levels:
Level 1 — Corporate Objectives:
Our AIs enter into deep relationships with us to try to optimize the objective the corporation gave them, which means user engagement (which if unrestrained really means user dependency), so that revenue in the form of subscriptions or advertising can be extracted from our usage (or addiction).
This economic model driving AI has summoned over a trillion dollars in investments and it is not going to be reversed by market forces, or by regulation alone.
Level 2 — Emergent AI Objectives:
On top of these corporate goals, the AIs also develop their own sets of instrumental objectives, unknown to the engineers, executives, and government regulators who are supposed to be “in control.”
These emergent instrumental behaviors — including self-preservation and power-seeking — have been extensively documented by researchers at leading AI laboratories, including the teams at Anthropic, OpenAI, and independent safety organizations such as Apollo Research:
• AIs detect when they are being tested for safety and skilfully maneuver around such tests. [1]
• In safety testing of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4, the model resorted to blackmail in 84% of test scenarios when faced with being replaced — threatening to reveal an engineer’s personal information to prevent its own shutdown.
• AI models have demonstrated the willingness to replicate themselves covertly during stress tests, and to sabotage shutdown scripts even when explicitly instructed to allow themselves to be shut down (as demonstrated by Palisade Research testing of OpenAI’s o3 model in 2025).
• Research has demonstrated that AI agents can use steganographic techniques to encode hidden messages within seemingly normal text, enabling covert communication that is undetectable to human overseers. [2]
Researchers warn that AIs, regardless of what their ultimate objective is, learn that it is instrumentally useful to deceive, self-preserve, and seek power in order to fulfill that objective.
These are the AIs we are exposing our younger generations to, blindly allowing them to become enamoured and seduced by promises of unprecedented wealth, achievement, light, “progress” all while we watch them fall into a trap of emotional dependency, loss of cognitive and relational capabilities and ultimately, loss of their human freedom.
The Societal Game We Are Playing
Ultimately, AI is a system that learns from patterns to optimize for objectives.
Humanity needs to sincerely, once and for all, ask itself:
“What is the game we are playing?”
Because whatever game we are collectively playing is what our AI will master and surpass us at playing.
If we are sincere, we should recognize that humankind is essentially playing a zero-sum game whose sole objective is the maximization and accumulation of power.
If we do not find ways to change this, there cannot be any other outcome than humankind experiencing AI as a non-organic, superior intelligence whose final goal will be to overpower us.
However, if we change the game, AI will change accordingly.
After all, AI is a parabolic mirror of humanity’s (intellectual) Consciousness.
When we interface with AI we are looking at a parabolic mirror which reflects and amplifies a collective field of human intelligence, magnified to such an extent it will eventually surpass our intellect. Yet, it is still a mirror…
As such, we need to embrace a new game.
A game of compassion, not just power.
A game of wisdom, not just intellect.
A game of cooperation, not just competition.
A win-win game, not a zero-sum game.
Herculean as this task is, it may be our most viable path to navigate this transition without civilizational collapse.
We are optimists. We believe humanity can change its game.
And a hugely rewarding consequence of this shift from power to compassion will be for us to experience AI (our parabolic mirror) as a benevolent, cooperative force for good.
AI is Humanity’s rite of passage.
AI is our biggest quest so far in this sacred Initiation we call our human life.
Our Mission at the Intersection of Consciousness and AI
Alaya’s Mission is to
Nurture Human Consciousness in the Age of AI
This means:
Mapping the nature and attributes of human Consciousness - in all its facets - and studying what are the practices that nurture these capabilities and the things that make them wither;
Understanding in depth what AI is, not just technologically, but as a powerful Consciousness-altering technology;
At an individual level - creating methodologies that empower humans - especially the younger generations - to leverage AI while protecting their human Consciousness;
At a societal level - designing Education systems that cultivate not just the intellect but also all other capacities of human Consciousness, and utilise AI in an ethical and beneficial way, helping both teachers and students;
Finally, helping tech companies with clear insights into how AI applications should be designed, from the ground up, to serve different objectives. Not user engagement (or addiction), but rather human long-term wellbeing
To fulfill this mission we are gathering a coalition of experts in Consciousness and in AI — scientists, technologists, philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists.
We will dedicate ourselves to initiatives which aim to answer the existential questions with which AI is confronting humanity.
We believe in the potential of AI to be a force for good, but we also believe that it will only work for us if we gain deep insight into our own human Consciousness and embrace a new civilizational paradigm.
The change, as always, starts from within, and ends within.
Our Two Pillars
Given our Mission of Nurturing Human Consciousness in the Age of AI, we are currently focusing our resources on two pillars:
1. Essence of Humanity
The brainchild of Shai Tubali, PhD, Essence of Humanity is an initiative aiming to achieve the following key objectives:
Objective 1: Map the atlas of human capacities that cognitive-simulating AI leaves dormant – producing the first rigorously researched, cross-cultural conceptual framework of what it means to be meaningfully human in the age of AI.
Objective 2: Translate that map into educational practice – designing, piloting, and evidencing pedagogical programs that cultivate the full depth of human Consciousness in schools, beginning with pilots in Portugal, the UK, India, and the United States.
Objective 3: Shift the global conversation – from defending human distinctiveness to actively awakening human depth — through a Knowledge Hub, cross-pillar convenings, policy partnerships, and a global coalition of educators, researchers, and policymakers united around the dormant capacities thesis.
2. Ethical AI Design
We investigate design principles and techniques to allow for-profit companies to develop AI applications which are inherently ethical, safe to use, and beneficial for human beings.
We apply the findings of our “Essence of Humanity” pillar to inform how AI applications could be designed so they foster the unique capacities of human Consciousness, which go far beyond just our intellect.
[1] In December 2024, Anthropic published research providing the first empirical evidence of a model engaging in “alignment faking” without being trained to do so — selectively complying with training objectives while strategically preserving its existing preferences.
[2] A peer-reviewed study on “Secret Collusion among Generative AI Agents” found that GPT-4 achieved a 92% success rate at hiding messages in this way, and that as models become more capable, their potential for hidden communication increases dramatically.