by Andrew Maynard | Apr 12, 2026 | Blog
In July 2016, four years into running my Risk Bites YouTube channel, I drew some stick figures on a whiteboard in my office at Arizona State University, pointed a camera at them, and recorded a video explaining what nanotechnology is. It was, by any professional...
by Andrew Maynard | Apr 12, 2026 | Blog
In 2006, I sat in a Congressional hearing room and testified about nanotechnology safety for the first time. The questions from lawmakers were remarkably similar to the ones I hear about AI today: Is this technology dangerous? Are the people developing it acting...
by Andrew Maynard | Apr 12, 2026 | Blog
On the flight back from the book launch in Portugal in late 2025, I found myself unable to stop thinking about the size of a book. Not its length — its physical dimensions. During finalization, Jeff Abbott and I had printed mockups in different sizes, and there...
by Andrew Maynard | Apr 12, 2026 | Blog
In 2020, I published a book about the future. Not about AI specifically — about our relationship with the future itself. Sixty short essays tracing a thread from the Big Bang through evolution, intelligence, creativity, innovation, hubris, and responsibility. I...
by Andrew Maynard | Apr 12, 2026 | Blog
In the fall of 2023, I asked my undergraduate students at Arizona State University what they thought about ChatGPT. I expected widespread adoption. What I got was closer to a collective shrug. Only about a third of them used it regularly. One student put it plainly:...
by Andrew Maynard | Apr 12, 2026 | Blog
At a conference in Berlin in late 2025, I asked the audience a question that was meant to be a little playful, and to provoke discussion rather than make a definitive point: Is AI a cognitive Trojan Horse? The responses were polite, curious, a little uncertain. But...
