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?
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This salon convenes leading voices in evolutionary science, the future of tech, and human potential to explore how humanity and AI might co-evolve toward unprecedented global cooperation. Together, we’ll examine the frontiers of human and machine intelligence, the pathways toward alignment at both biological and societal levels, and the role of leadership, ethics, and cooperation in shaping our collective future.

Hosted by Human Energy, the evening wove together evolutionary science, cooperation theory, cognition, and AI through perspectives from Terry Deacon (UC Berkeley), Athena Aktipis (Cooperative Futures Institute), Peter Fenton (Benchmark Capital), and Nichol Bradford (Human + Tech Week).
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Through conversation and community, this salon will surface insights into how humanity can navigate unprecedented technological change while deepening connection, resilience, and purpose.

Held at SHACK15 at the Ferry Building on November 11th, 2025. This salon is part of the Human Energy Global Salon Series. An intimate and by invitation only experience.

This event is made possible through catalytic sponsorship by Benchmark.

**Learn more about Human Energy**
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The N2 2024: The Noosphere & the Global South conference explored the intersection of technology, society, and the noosphere—the sphere of human thought and collective consciousness. Hosted by Human Energy and UM6P, this year’s event brought together leading thinkers, visionaries, and innovators to discuss solutions to the challenges posed by the techno-social era. Through engaging presentations and collaborative dialogue, N2 2024 aims to inspire actionable insights and transformative change.

Youssef Moulane Presentation:

Cosmic Consciousness: Exploring the Noosphere's Role in Astrophysics and Astrobiology

The concept of the noosphere, introduced by Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin, refers to the collective sphere of human thought and consciousness emerging from the biosphere. In this talk, I will explore the intersections between the noosphere and astrophysics, considering human consciousness as a factor in the universe's evolutionary framework. By linking the noosphere to astrophysical concepts, we examine its potential influence on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence through techno-signatures and the implications of humanity’s growing cosmic impact, such as space exploration and astro-engineering. The noosphere invites a philosophical interpretation of the data provided by astrophysics, encouraging a dialogue on humanity's responsibility as an intelligent force within the cosmos. Furthermore, the concept can be applied to astrobiology, exploring the evolution of consciousness and intelligence beyond Earth. Integrating the noosphere with astrophysics thus provides a holistic perspective on the development of intelligence in the universe and our potential role in cosmic evolution.

N2 2024: The Noosphere & The Global South took place on December 16th - 18th in Ben Guerir, Morocco  🌐

The N2 Conference looks to deepen our present understanding and future vision for the noosphere, the sphere of human consciousness and mental activity especially in regard to its influence on the biosphere and in relation to evolution. 

N2 is an international, interdisciplinary conference bringing together leading scientists, scholars from across the disciplines, thought leaders, creative artists, and all those who are interested in the meaning and possibility of the noosphere for our collective future.

We invite you to join the conversation and keep watching more N2 2024 presentations on this channel. Subscribe for updates and insights as we continue to explore the transformative potential of worldview, technology and the noosphere.

Learn more at https://www.humanenergy.io/

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Zkpb4ktHdIk

The N2 2024: The Noosphere & the Global South conference explored the intersection of technology, society, and the noosphere—the sphere of human thought and collective consciousness. Hosted by Human Energy and UM6P, this year’s event brought together leading thinkers, visionaries, and innovators to discuss solutions to the challenges posed by the techno-social era. Through engaging presentations and collaborative dialogue, N2 2024 aims to inspire actionable insights and transformative change.

Tomás Veloz's Presentation:

Integrating Complexity and Modes of Knowledge for Inter-Globals Collaboration

In the face of exponential technological advancements and profound global challenges, the need for a comprehensive understanding of the evolution of the noosphere—our collective consciousness—has never been more urgent. As a person born and raised in the Global south (Chile) and being an interdisciplinary researcher building collaborations for nearly 15 years between the Globals not only in science, but also in technology and the arts, this talk seeks to explore how we can ethically and effectively guide the evolution of the noosphere, putting special emphasis in the so-called "wicked problems" and the importance of an effective dialogue between the Globals to solve them.

Wicked problems can only be represented in a multifaceted and incomplete way (inter/transdisciplinary), they have a multilevel, processual, and complex adaptive nature (non-objectual), and consciously experiencing them is transformative (enactive). These features of wicked problems make the construction of knowledge about them an endeavor that i) cannot be only circumscribed to academic and dominant circles, and ii) cannot be understood without the consideration of all parties (and levels) involved. The latter calls for a revision of the normative views (Global North/Western) about what it means to build knowledge and to perform decision making and action.

In the first part of this talk I will elaborate on the above-mentioned features of wicked problems and present a proposal of a model of noospheric knowledge construction that does not conform to knowledge hierarchies validated by academia and that it is participatory by default. In the second part of this talk, I will review some experiences both as an academic and director of a non-profit living working between Chile and Belgium and bridging multiple organizations between the Global North and South. As a result of these experiences, I will propose a framework for interdisciplinary and international collaboration, emphasizing how different types of knowledge—theoretical, practical, and experiential—can converge to ethically steer the future of the noosphere. The talk will end highlighting the importance of inclusivity and the role of the Global South in shaping the future and resilience of global consciousness.

N2 2024: The Noosphere & The Global South took place on December 16th - 18th in Ben Guerir, Morocco  🌐

The N2 Conference looks to deepen our present understanding and future vision for the noosphere, the sphere of human consciousness and mental activity especially in regard to its influence on the biosphere and in relation to evolution. 

N2 is an international, interdisciplinary conference bringing together leading scientists, scholars from across the disciplines, thought leaders, creative artists, and all those who are interested in the meaning and possibility of the noosphere for our collective future.

We invite you to join the conversation and keep watching more N2 2024 presentations on this channel. Subscribe for updates and insights as we continue to explore the transformative potential of worldview, technology and the noosphere.

Learn more at https://www.humanenergy.io/

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/7oRgfkS4yz4

Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s thought-provoking presentation at N2 2024 challenges us to rethink the noosphere as more than a natural evolution of global consciousness. While building on the scientific and theological foundations of Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin, Diagne highlights the critical need to address political and cultural divides—especially the inequality between the Global North and South. Drawing on the works of L.S. Senghor, Diagne presents a vision of the noosphere that celebrates cultural convergence and equity, urging us to work against structural injustices to realize its full promise. This talk bridges science, ethics, and politics to illuminate the path toward a shared humanity.

The N2 2024: The Noosphere & the Global South conference explored the intersection of technology, society, and the noosphere—the sphere of human thought and collective consciousness. Hosted by Human Energy and UM6P, this year’s event brought together leading thinkers, visionaries, and innovators to discuss solutions to the challenges posed by the techno-social era. Through engaging presentations and collaborative dialogue, N2 2024 aims to inspire actionable insights and transformative change.

Souleymane Bachir Diagne Presentation:

Noosphere and a Politics of Humanity

The emergence of the noosphere as a "thinking layer of the biosphere" presupposes an emergence of cosmopolitanism out of the tribal fragmentation of the human kind. Noosphere must be a politics of humanity.

N2 2024: The Noosphere & The Global South took place on December 16th - 18th in Ben Guerir, Morocco  🌐

The N2 Conference looks to deepen our present understanding and future vision for the noosphere, the sphere of human consciousness and mental activity especially in regard to its influence on the biosphere and in relation to evolution. 

N2 is an international, interdisciplinary conference bringing together leading scientists, scholars from across the disciplines, thought leaders, creative artists, and all those who are interested in the meaning and possibility of the noosphere for our collective future.

We invite you to join the conversation and keep watching more N2 2024 presentations on this channel. Subscribe for updates and insights as we continue to explore the transformative potential of worldview, technology and the noosphere.

Learn more at https://www.humanenergy.io/

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/rgNBow3Wu_A

The N2 2024: The Noosphere & the Global South conference explored the intersection of technology, society, and the noosphere—the sphere of human thought and collective consciousness. Hosted by Human Energy and UM6P, this year’s event brought together leading thinkers, visionaries, and innovators to discuss solutions to the challenges posed by the techno-social era. Through engaging presentations and collaborative dialogue, N2 2024 aims to inspire actionable insights and transformative change.

Parham Pourdavood's Presentation:

AI reframed as an organic evolutionary process fueled by human creativity

Debates surrounding the nature of artificial intelligence (AI) often revolve around whether AI is evolving into an independent intelligent entity with agency or if it remains a form of algorithmic mimicry, destined to remain disconnected from the organic principles that govern cognition and life. A closer examination suggests that while AI systems lack agency and the essential organic principles needed for selfhood and cognition, they operate according to a logic that mirrors a principle within organisms—namely, the dynamic compression and decompression of information. Just as compressed genetic information is utilized and decompressed by cells through novel interactions—ultimately giving rise to the development of cognition and agency at the collective scale of the organism—technologies like Large Language Models (LLMs) can be viewed as compressed forms of humanity’s behavioral patterns, which, when creatively interpreted and utilized, could afford the development of identity and agency at a planetary scale. From this perspective, an ethical framework emerges in which AI serves as a tool for amplifying human perspective, imagination, collaboration, and self-reflection, while offering an organic model and precedent for a harmonious relationship between the embodied, intuitive nature of living beings and their abstract, compressed representations. This vision echoes Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the “collective memory of the human race” as an organic phenomenon, where the liberation of human creativity through automation might enable a novel evolutionary process on a planetary scale.

N2 2024: The Noosphere & The Global South took place on December 16th - 18th in Ben Guerir, Morocco  🌐

The N2 Conference looks to deepen our present understanding and future vision for the noosphere, the sphere of human consciousness and mental activity especially in regard to its influence on the biosphere and in relation to evolution. 

N2 is an international, interdisciplinary conference bringing together leading scientists, scholars from across the disciplines, thought leaders, creative artists, and all those who are interested in the meaning and possibility of the noosphere for our collective future.

We invite you to join the conversation and keep watching more N2 2024 presentations on this channel. Subscribe for updates and insights as we continue to explore the transformative potential of worldview, technology and the noosphere.

Learn more at https://www.humanenergy.io/

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/XtitqrYcvW4

The N2 2024: The Noosphere & the Global South conference explored the intersection of technology, society, and the noosphere—the sphere of human thought and collective consciousness. Hosted by Human Energy and UM6P, this year’s event brought together leading thinkers, visionaries, and innovators to discuss solutions to the challenges posed by the techno-social era. Through engaging presentations and collaborative dialogue, N2 2024 aims to inspire actionable insights and transformative change.

Olivier Servais's Presentation:

Beyond Individualism: The Organic Dynamics of Digital Sociability and the Guild Model

This talk explores the tension between digital technology’s role in fostering individualism and its potential to enable new forms of collective life. While phenomena such as hikikomori and rising social anxieties support fears of digital isolation, emerging studies on online and hybrid communities challenge this perspective. Drawing on the concept of “guilds,” historically rooted in mutual aid and collaboration, the talk examines their digital resurgence as models for organizing collective life across online and offline domains. Additionally, it considers the rise of hybrid communities involving humans, bots, and AI, which reconfigure traditional notions of sociability. The discussion posits a shift from "digital natives" to "digital autochthons," inhabitants of a new digital-human ecology, offering insights into the evolution of collective identity and social organization in the 21st century.

N2 2024: The Noosphere & The Global South took place on December 16th - 18th in Ben Guerir, Morocco  🌐

The N2 Conference looks to deepen our present understanding and future vision for the noosphere, the sphere of human consciousness and mental activity especially in regard to its influence on the biosphere and in relation to evolution. 

N2 is an international, interdisciplinary conference bringing together leading scientists, scholars from across the disciplines, thought leaders, creative artists, and all those who are interested in the meaning and possibility of the noosphere for our collective future.

We invite you to join the conversation and keep watching more N2 2024 presentations on this channel. Subscribe for updates and insights as we continue to explore the transformative potential of worldview, technology and the noosphere.

Learn more at https://www.humanenergy.io/

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Iu5Y_G4nrqg

Join us for an immersive evening of dialogue, connection, and insight at Human Energy's New York City Salon, recorded live at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus on June 12, 2025. This salon is part of the Human Energy Global Salon Series.
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This salon, title Human Energy for Work & Life: Cultivating Agency, Connection, and Purposes in the Age of AI brings together leading thinkers in science, business, psychology, and AI. Together, we'll consider how human energy—our capacity for resilience, adaptability, and connection—can be cultivated in the face of today’s complex personal and planetary challenges. Through conversation and community, we’ll explore the science of human connection, prosocial AI, the role of leadership in complexity, and the emerging paradigms reshaping how we live and work.

HOST:

Sheila Hassell Hughes
CEO, HUMAN ENERGY 
Professor and Former Dean of Liberal Arts, Saint Mary’s College of California

FEATURED SPEAKERS:

Cornelia C. Walther
Director, POZE, a global alliance for systemic change that benefits people and planet
Wharton AI & Analytics Visiting Scholar

Raj Sisodia
FEMSA Distinguished University Professor and Chairman,
Conscious Enterprise Center, Tecnológico de Monterrey

James A. Coan
Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology and Director of the Virginia Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, University of Virginia

David S. Wilson
Human Energy Advisory Board Member
SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biology and Anthropology, Binghamton University


Learn more:
https://www.humanenergy.io/events/fordham-salon

The N2 2024: The Noosphere & the Global South conference explored the intersection of technology, society, and the noosphere—the sphere of human thought and collective consciousness. Hosted by Human Energy and UM6P, this year’s event brought together leading thinkers, visionaries, and innovators to discuss solutions to the challenges posed by the techno-social era. Through engaging presentations and collaborative dialogue, N2 2024 aims to inspire actionable insights and transformative change.

Natasha Vita More Presentation:

The Human Mind: An Homage (or Love Letter)

This talk traces the remarkable journey of our species' most distinctive asset: our capacity for complex thought and self-awareness. The human mind has evolved as an instrument of possibility through courage, creativity, reasoning, and optimism—the traits that form cornerstones of our species' success. These traits have empowered humans to transcend biological limitations, overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges, and actively shape our individual and collective destiny. From the first stone tools to modern artificial intelligence, from cave paintings to quantum physics, we see how the human mind's capacity for innovation and abstract thought has consistently propelled us toward a noösphere. Yet, as AI becomes increasingly intertwined with cognitive processes, can we distinguish between our innate human mind and AI-influenced thinking? And more crucially, could AI erode what makes our minds uniquely human or significantly evolve our minds beyond what we can conceptualize today?

N2 2024: The Noosphere & The Global South took place on December 16th - 18th in Ben Guerir, Morocco  🌐

The N2 Conference looks to deepen our present understanding and future vision for the noosphere, the sphere of human consciousness and mental activity especially in regard to its influence on the biosphere and in relation to evolution. 

N2 is an international, interdisciplinary conference bringing together leading scientists, scholars from across the disciplines, thought leaders, creative artists, and all those who are interested in the meaning and possibility of the noosphere for our collective future.

We invite you to join the conversation and keep watching more N2 2024 presentations on this channel. Subscribe for updates and insights as we continue to explore the transformative potential of worldview, technology and the noosphere.

Learn more at https://www.humanenergy.io/

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/RFHzLW2isA8

In this compelling presentation, Montassir Sakhi revisits Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the noosphere through the lens of the Global South. He explores the tensions between universalism, colonial legacies, and contemporary inequalities, emphasizing the urgent need to address borderization and systemic division. By integrating critical perspectives, Sakhi challenges us to envision a truly unified human spirit grounded in justice and inclusion.

The N2 2024: The Noosphere & the Global South conference explored the intersection of technology, society, and the noosphere—the sphere of human thought and collective consciousness. Hosted by Human Energy and UM6P, this year’s event brought together leading thinkers, visionaries, and innovators to discuss solutions to the challenges posed by the techno-social era. Through engaging presentations and collaborative dialogue, N2 2024 aims to inspire actionable insights and transformative change.

Montassir Sakhi's presentation:

"Raison d’État" and the collective conscience: thinking about borders from the perspective of the noosphere

How can the theories and concepts developed in the noosphere paradigm help us to rethink the tragedy that is currently taking place around the closing of the borders of the global North? More precisely, how can global concepts that are based on the idea of humanist and universalist reason help us today to question border policies that are based on repressive measures?

This talk analyses how concepts such as "the new man" (Fanon, 1961), "oceanic feeling" (Freud, 1930) and “collective consciousness” (de Chardin, 1955) are challenged by the new "Raison d'État" (Foucault, 1978) that has emerged since the birth of modernity. The aim is to see how this Raison is reinvented in post-colonial times through the phenomenon of the border and its central mechanisms (visas, detention centres, expulsions, etc.). In the work of the three thinkers mentioned above, and in an approach that could be called "revolutionary noosphere", the aim is then to rediscover an awareness of and an overcoming of public policies that are both national and imperial, based on the practice of borderisation. This talk will provide an opportunity to draw on ethnographic research currently being carried out in Morocco with families and groups at risk of disappearance in Europe's borderlands, mainly the Mediteranean Sea. Their experiences will be used to describe both the repression of Europe's borders and the solidarity forged in collective struggles. This talk will show how these solidarities today constitute spaces that can be compared to the "collective consciousness" to which the noosphere invites us.

N2 2024: The Noosphere & The Global South took place on December 16th - 18th in Ben Guerir, Morocco  🌐

The N2 Conference looks to deepen our present understanding and future vision for the noosphere, the sphere of human consciousness and mental activity especially in regard to its influence on the biosphere and in relation to evolution. 

N2 is an international, interdisciplinary conference bringing together leading scientists, scholars from across the disciplines, thought leaders, creative artists, and all those who are interested in the meaning and possibility of the noosphere for our collective future.

We invite you to join the conversation and keep watching more N2 2024 presentations on this channel. Subscribe for updates and insights as we continue to explore the transformative potential of worldview, technology and the noosphere.

Learn more at https://www.humanenergy.io/

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/kQVo-1YGKnY

Michael Pirson Presentation:

The Business of the Noosphere

What if the business of business wasn’t business but the Noosphere? What does that even mean? Business has been a driving force of the economy, politics, and society for better or worse. In this session we explore the paradigmatic foundations of business and organizations at large to become a lever of Noospheric progress. We also highlight the possibility and potential of leadership of business and organizations to create a world that works for everyone.

N2 2024: The Noosphere & The Global South took place on December 16th - 18th in Ben Guerir, Morocco  🌐

The N2 Conference looks to deepen our present understanding and future vision for the noosphere, the sphere of human consciousness and mental activity especially in regard to its influence on the biosphere and in relation to evolution. 

N2 is an international, interdisciplinary conference bringing together leading scientists, scholars from across the disciplines, thought leaders, creative artists, and all those who are interested in the meaning and possibility of the noosphere for our collective future.

We invite you to join the conversation and keep watching more N2 2024 presentations on this channel. Subscribe for updates and insights as we continue to explore the transformative potential of worldview, technology and the noosphere.

Learn more at https://www.humanenergy.io/

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/5p6sZ_TNvcs