In 2023 we walked again into H-FARM. We have been coming here since 2012. The fields are still there. The rhythm has changed.

That day, innovation felt quieter. More precise.

We encountered Federico Faggin. A man who does not need introduction, yet deserves context every time. He is the physicist and entrepreneur who created the microprocessor and the touchscreen. Two inventions that reshaped the last fifty years of civilization. Every device we touch carries his fingerprints.

Thanks to Faggin, the Intel 4004 was not just a chip. It was a threshold. Computation left the laboratory and entered daily life. The touchscreen followed the same path. From abstraction to instinct. From machine to hand.

Now, Faggin speaks about something even deeper.

On the H-FARM campus, he sat for an interview with Anthony Saccon, Education, Equity and Inclusion Program Director at the H for Human Foundation. The setting was simple. The questions were not.

The conversation moved away from performance metrics and market cycles. It went straight to the core. Consciousness. Free will. The limits of artificial intelligence.

Faggin was clear. Computers compute. Humans experience. No amount of processing power creates awareness. Algorithms manipulate symbols. Consciousness feels meaning. He spoke of the mistake of confusing intelligence with consciousness, speed with understanding.

Artificial intelligence, he explained, can simulate aspects of cognition but not the inner experience. There is no subject inside the machine. No sense of self. No free will. Technology remains a tool, not a being.

Listening to him at H-FARM created a strange continuity. Years ago we came here to explore electronic money, systems without intermediaries, trust encoded in math. Now we listen to the man who made computation personal explain why the future cannot be reduced to machines alone, while we build EMOTITECH our company connecting human emotions with machines.

Innovation, in his words, is not an escape from humanity. It is a responsibility toward it.

The campus around us felt aligned with that idea. H-FARM as a place of education, entrepreneurship, and reflection. Not just acceleration, but orientation.

Faggin does not reject technology. He asks it to stay in its place. He reminds us that consciousness is not an emergent property of complexity but a fundamental aspect of reality. That free will is real. That meaning cannot be computed.

When he finished speaking, there was no applause rush. Just silence. The good kind. The kind that stays with you.

Some people invent tools.
Some people change epochs.
Very few return to ask what it all means.