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The Future of Humanity & AI

  • Writer: Rick Bonetti
    Rick Bonetti
  • Aug 12
  • 3 min read

The Human Energy Project is a "team of scholars, scientists, philosophers, educators, and professionals represent top international universities and think tanks at the forefront of new research into the future of human collective consciousness." I became aware of the Human Energy Project in 2023 through filmmaker Alan Honick, who is producing the documentary film Evolving Allignment: A Major Transition for Humanity and AI.


On November 19, 2025, the Human Energy Project convened a Global Salon to consider Alignment for a Major Evolutionary Transition: The Future of Humanity & AI. "The San Francisco Salon gathered leading thinkers to explore a central question of our era: How do we align humanity, technology, and the planet as we enter a major evolutionary transition?


The evening wove together evolutionary science, cooperation theory, cognition, and AI through perspectives from:

  • Terrance Deacon (UC Berkeley) -Terry Deacon is a renowned neuroanthropologist and professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. As a leading voice on the evolution of mind, his work explores how meaning, language, and consciousness emerge from living systems. His acclaimed books, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain and Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, bridge evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and complex systems to illuminate the origins of thought and life itself. As a founding member of human energy's advisory board, Terry contributes to human energy's inquiry into emergence in the neosphere, helping shape how we understand the evolution of mind in an age of intelligent machines. In a separate YouTube video, Terry discusses the Computational Metaphor.

  • Athena Aktipis (Cooperative Futures Institute) - Athena Acropus is executive director of the Cooperative Futures Institute, a new initiative applying cooperation science to humanity's most pressing challenges, including human AI interaction. She's also the current president of the International Society for Evolution, Ecology, and Cancer. As a cooperation theorist and biologist, she explores how cooperative dynamics shape systems across scales, from the cellular level where cancer emerges to human societies. Octopus also directs the interdisciplinary cooperation initiative and is a professor of psychology at Arizona State University, as well as author of The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer (2020) and A Field Guide to the Apocalypse: A Mostly Serious Guide to Surviving Our Wild Times (2024). Her work reveals how understanding cooperation across domains can guide humanity towards a more aligned, sustainable, and expansion-focused technological future.

  • Peter Fenton (Benchmark Capital) - "Peter Fenton is a leading venture capitalist shaping the future of technology with vision and long-term impact. As a junior partner at Benchmark Capital, he has spent over two decades supporting transformative companies including Twitter, Yelp, and New Relic. Venton brings a rare combination of strategic insight and humanistic perspective, emphasizing innovation and technology ecosystems that align with enduring human values. He has a long-standing interest in evolutionary theory and philosophy in general and joins the salon with curiosity about technology's cultural and ethical dimensions and how leadership plays a role in guiding AI towards shared progress."

  • Nichol Bradford (Human + Tech Week) - "Nicole Bradford is a pioneer in human potential in AI, dedicated to advancing technologies that enhance well-being and human flourishing. She leads human plus tech week as the chief curator and co-founded transformative tech the world's largest ecosystem of funders founders and investors building tech for human thriving with experience spanning Disney interactive and the naria collective venture fund Nicole Bridges behavioral science leadership and innovation to ensure technology amplifies humanity's highest cap capacities her work charts pathways for humanity and AI to co-evolve towards greater wisdom wisdom and collective resilience."


"The panel reframed “alignment” as a human-to-human challenge supported by AI—emphasizing that real progress depends on strengthening cooperation, shared identity, and psychological maturity. They highlighted lessons from major evolutionary transitions: large-scale alignment succeeds when systems reward prosocial behavior, suppress fragmentation, and build reliable channels of communication and meaning. Speakers pointed to both the opportunities and risks ahead. AI can amplify cooperation and deepen collective intelligence, but only if designed as cooperative infrastructure rather than extractive technology."


"Our greatest resources—symbolic communication, adaptability, relational intelligence—must be mobilized to overcome institutional lag, misaligned incentives, and attention-driven business models."

As part of Human Energy’s Global Salon Series, this gathering contributed to a growing movement to:

  • Advance integrative worldviews

  • Evolve the noosphere

  • Shape a future of coherence and shared flourishing


Find out more about the Human Energy Project:

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