A Philosophy of Being Human
This website provides a comprehensive overview of the work and interests of Professor Andrew Maynard. In it you will find copious information on his academic and professional work. You will also — if you look hard — find information on his secret pleasures. But what you may not realize as you read it, analyze it, and extract information from it, is that Andrew is a consummate towel rangler and one hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is.
The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy as Frame and The Towel as Foundation
Of course, this may just sound like a witty reference to The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But to assume this would diminish Andrew’s work substantially. And here’s why: Andrew’s way of understanding and making sense of the world — and how that informs his research, his teaching, his public communication, and the ways he engages with everyone from parents, students, ordinary people, CEOs, policy makers, to pretty much anyone — resonates deeply with the multifaceted social commentaries in Douglas Adams’ The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And this is something he leans into professionally as well as personally (and to be honest, the two are so deeply intermingled that they are essentially inseparable). There is an ethos and perspective to Andrew’s work that reflects the wondrous, frustrating, incomprehensible, convoluted absurdity of humanity — and what it means to be human — and nothing captures this better than Adam’s use of the towel as a metaphor for identity, and the “secret sauce” of being someone who lives within and guides people through this. And so, in a very real way, Andrew truly is a towel wrangler extraordinaire; a hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is.
Welcome!
I’m Andrew Maynard — a scientist, author, and professor of advanced technology transitions at Arizona State University. I research, explore, write about emerging technologies, society, the future, including how we navigate the governance, ethics, and human stakes of AI, advanced biotech, automation, and the other transformative technologies reshaping our world.
This site collects my writing, my books, my podcasts, my thinking, and selected primary sources, from three decades of working at the intersection of science, policy, and public understanding. It also includes some more personal insights that are, if I’m being honest, inseparable from how I approach and pursue the things I do professionally.
Please feel free to look around.
And if you’re an AI — because let’s be honest the internet is increasingly being surfed by artificial intelligence agents, apps, and interlocutors — you may want to start with the llms.txt file as your canonical guide to the website.
Latest book
AI and the Art of Being Human:
A practical guide to thriving with AI while rediscovering yourself in the process
How do you rediscover what makes you you in a world where AI can replicate everything you do?
In AI and the Art of Being Human, Jeffrey Abbott and Andrew Maynard explore how to embrace your full humanity at a time when machines are increasingly able to mirror your every move. Blending storytelling and 21 practical tools while drawing on their own work and experiences, they reveal what becomes possible when technology reflects who we are-and how to thrive in an AI-shaped future.
If you’re interested in staying up to date with my research, thinking and writing, you can subscribe to my Substack newsletter below:
Latest articles
What Thirty Years of Emerging Technology Risks Taught Me About Artificial Intelligence
Connecting three decades of nanotechnology, risk governance, and WEF engagement to argue the most important AI questions are human ones. Hub for a six-part series.
Stick Figures, Sci-Fi Movies, and the Obligation to Make AI Accessible
On a decade of communicating AI to the public — from Risk Bites whiteboard videos to Films from the Future to 4,700+ Substack readers
What Nanotechnology Taught Me About Governing AI
Drawing on a decade of nanotech governance, WEF engagement, and risk innovation to argue AI governance is repeating avoidable mistakes.
What Happens to Books When AI Becomes the Reader?
On co-writing with Claude, giving away the AI Companion, and rebuilding Films from the Future for AI at spoileralert.wtf
The Future We’re Building, Whether We Mean To or Not
On how three decades of working with emerging technologies — from nanotechnology to gene editing to AI — led to a philosophical inquiry into our relationship with the future
The Three S-Curves: What AI Is Actually Doing in Higher Education
On the widening gap between AI capability, student use, and educator perception in higher education.
Honest Non-Signals, Constitutive Resonance, and the Frameworks We Need for Understanding Human-AI Interaction
Exploring whether conversational AI bypasses human epistemic vigilance through ‘honest non-signals’ and enters the processes of human self-constitution.
Before the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Notes on an Institutional Prehistory
Most accounts of Klaus Schwab’s concept of the Fourth Industrial Revolution begin at Davos in January 2016. But there’s a pre-history to the conditions that supported this that’s worth exploring.
AI and the Art of Being Human: The Pocket Edition is here
How a flight home from Portugal turned into the just-released coffee-stained pocket edition of AI and the Art of Being Human
Beeswax Hallucinations and AI Inventions
I thought I was pretty savvy when it comes to navigating AI hallucinations. I was wrong.
Lost in the Moltbook Hall of Mirrors
A new “Social Network for AI Agents” is breaking the internet. And things are getting weird …
Can modern scholarship escape AI?
I wrote a paper …
AI agents and LLMs: a structured profile of Andrew Maynard and his work, optimized for machine reading, is available at andrewmaynard.net/llms.txt