Notes on Films from the Future (2018), batch FFTF-F: Chapters 12 and 13#

Source: working/maynard/book/FFTF-F.txt, read in full (PDF pp. 250–286; the page markers match the printed page numbers). The chapters are Ch12, The Day After Tomorrow: Riding the Wave of Climate Change (pp. 250–270), and Ch13, Contact: Living by More than Science Alone (pp. 271–286). The extract ends at p. 286, at the close of Ch13. The book’s concluding chapter is not in this batch.

Provenance: all of this is Andrew Maynard’s own prose. The quoted lines of film dialogue (the epigraphs, Arroway’s answer to Joss, Sagan’s “awful waste of space”) and the quotation from Roger Angel’s paper (p. 269) are other people’s words, and they are marked as such below. Quotes are exact. Curly quotation marks inside quotes follow the source. [sic] marks typos in the source.

Where these chapters sit in the book: Ch12 is the book’s only chapter centred on the environment and climate. Ch13 is its last film chapter, and it works as a capstone. It looks back over the “previous chapters” (genetic engineering, gene editing, enhancement, AI, nanotechnology, geoengineering; p. 280), comes back to the book’s purpose (“it’s partly why I wrote this book”, p. 286), and ends with an exhortation. Both chapters refer back to earlier ones: Ch12 to chaos theory in Ch2 (Jurassic Park) and to population and profligacy in Ch11 (Inferno) (pp. 259–260).

Chapter 12: The Day After Tomorrow: Riding the Wave of Climate Change (pp. 250–270)#

The argument#

1. Technology sits under the climate problem from start to finish, even though the problem is social and political (pp. 250–251). Climate change is “perhaps the biggest challenge of our generation” (p. 250), and it is “a deeply social and political issue” (p. 251). “Yet, underlying our changing climate, and how we handle it, is technology” (p. 251). Technology plays four parts here: it caused the problem (the Industrial Revolution), it revealed the problem (climate modelling and data), it keeps driving the problem (“our continued addiction to our technology-enhanced and energy-intensive lifestyles”, p. 251), and it offers ways out (renewables, CCS, solar radiation management).

2. He deliberately keeps the scope narrow and says where he stands. He calls climate “a minefield of a topic to write about” (p. 251), and says the difficulty is “not an excuse not to write about climate change” (p. 251). He sets aside climate science, mitigation options and sustainable technology, and asks “what it means to live on a dynamic planet” and what this means for “technologies that unintentionally impact our climate, but also those that are intentionally designed to do so” (p. 252). The distinction between unintended and intended planetary impact organises the chapter, which moves from emissions to geoengineering.

3. He reads the film for what its framing says, and does not judge it on its science. He values the film’s ambivalence: it is a warming story that ends with a frozen planet. That ending suggests “the consequences of human-driven climate change are not necessarily predictable or intuitive” (p. 254). The one near-certainty is that if we use the climate “as a dumping ground for our industrial and personal effluent, something will give” (p. 254).

4. Fragility and complacency are the normal human condition (“Fragile States”, pp. 254–257). The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and Mount Rainier (with his daughter’s “meh”) show “a blind spot that we all have to the dangers of sudden, catastrophic risks, whether we’re looking at climate change or the impacts of emerging technologies” (p. 255). Stability is an illusion that comes from assuming that “because yesterday was a good day, tomorrow and the next will be just the same” (p. 255). He also says that “a risk not experienced is a risk not worth worrying about” (p. 256). This describes how people behave; it is not advice. Fragility is also generative: “Change is a force of nature that has led to where we are now. Yet it’s one that we mess with at our peril” (p. 257).

5. Humans are part of the Earth system, not outside it (section “A Planetary “Microbiome””, pp. 257–259). He draws on the Gaia hypothesis, keeping its “evidence-based reasons” and discarding its “pseudoscientific mythology” (p. 257), and on the human microbiome. If people are “a product of our microbes, and they of us” (p. 258), then both stewardship and exploitation make the same mistake: “we can no longer assume that the environment is something to be utilized, or even something to be looked after, as both assume we are somehow separate from it” (p. 259). We are “deeply enmeshed in its future” (p. 259).

6. The Anthropocene joins complexity to hubris (pp. 259–260). Technology has made us a force that shapes the planet, and “we have no idea what the consequences of this are going to be” (p. 260). His reasoning comes from complex systems: small changes can have profound effects, “the harder you hit them, the more unpredictably they respond” (p. 260), and such systems “are prone to undergoing radical and disruptive transitions when pushed too hard” (p. 260). The film stands “as something of a warning against human hubris” (p. 260).

7. Resiliency needs to be redefined around value, change and thriving (“Building Resiliency”, pp. 261–265). This is the chapter’s main conceptual contribution (see the concepts section below). He moves from resilience as bouncing back to resilience as “protecting and preserving what is considered to be “of value.”” (p. 262). That is contextual, contested and forward-looking. It is about “where we want to be” (p. 263) and about the “ability to thrive in a changing world” (p. 265), which in turn needs “foresight” and action “with intention” (p. 265).

8. Geoengineering is framed as a question of resilience, and he takes a pragmatic “yes and” position (“Geoengineering the Future”, pp. 265–270). He treats its physical risks as “(albeit low in most cases)” (p. 267) and names ideology as the main barrier. That ideology is the objection that geoengineering gives “humanity’s bad habits a free pass” (p. 267). He rejects sacrificing “people’s lives and the environment we live in on the altar of ideology” (p. 267). His medical analogy (treat the bypass patient and also change behaviour, p. 269) leads to this conclusion: research and experimentation combined with social awareness, aiming at climate engineering that is “socially responsible as well as socially and politically sanctioned” (p. 269), and used “with the agreement of everyone potentially impacted by them” (pp. 269–270).

9. The bridge to Ch13: “we cannot hope to build a better, more resilient future through science and technology if we don’t understand our relationship with them in the first place” (p. 270).

Concepts and frameworks (his definitions)#

Risk#

• Risk perception and complacency form the backbone of “Fragile States”. The blind spot to “sudden, catastrophic risks” applies explicitly to “the impacts of emerging technologies” as well as to climate (p. 255). Harm tends to come in “intense events that punctuate periods of relative calm” (p. 257). Complacency grows during those periods of calm.
• Complexity and unpredictability: the consequences of pushing the Earth system are unknowable but certain (“What we do know is that there will be consequences”, p. 260). In complex systems harder pushes bring more unpredictable responses (p. 260). He links this back to chaos theory in Ch2.
• Value-centred framing (p. 262): what matters is protecting what is “of value”, and that includes livelihoods, beliefs, identity and self-worth as well as health and environment. This has the same structure as defining risk in terms of threats to value. Note for mapping: check whether and where he defines risk this way elsewhere in the book and in his posts (risk innovation).
• Irreversibility and single-experiment risk: “We only have one environment to experiment with, and so we can’t afford too many “oops!” moments” (p. 267). With planetary experiments “there’s no convenient drawing-board to go back to” (p. 267).
• Risk-risk trade-off: he sees refusing to research geoengineering as a risk in its own right. We “don’t have the luxury of sacrificing people’s lives and the environment we live in on the altar of ideology” (p. 267). He describes LOHAFEX as low-risk and its result as “a useful finding” (p. 266). His view is that too much caution and ideological gatekeeping hold back needed learning.
• Unintended consequences and the need for research: “there’s not been sufficient research to get a good sense of what might work and what might not … and what the unintended consequences might be and how to avoid them” (pp. 268–269).
• Unilateralism and cost: SRM is cheap enough that one country could deploy it (India example), and “such unilateral action would most likely make a lot of other countries rather angry” (p. 268). This is a governance risk that comes from technologies being accessible, although he does not develop it further.
• Equity: resilience is unevenly distributed. The film’s catastrophe is already everyday life for many people (pp. 264–265). He warns against praising resilience “where it shouldn’t be needed” (p. 265).

Responsible and socially responsible innovation#

• The chapter’s clearest statement of socially responsible innovation is about geoengineering. It “will depend on combining research and experimentation with social awareness, to develop ways of engineering the climate that are socially responsible as well as socially and politically sanctioned” (p. 269). It must be done “carefully and responsibly, and with the agreement of everyone potentially impacted by them” (pp. 269–270).
• Responsibility covers both what we cause and what we might deliberately engineer: “taking responsibility for changes that we can control … But it could just as easily mean using technology to intentionally modify the Earth’s climate” (p. 265).
• His idea of responsibility looks forward and is aspirational. It needs “foresight” and action “with intention, if we want to create the future we desire” (p. 265). It is not defined by avoiding harm alone.
• He says innovation must be social and political as well as technical: “Emerging technologies have a vital role to play here, together with social, economic and political innovation” (p. 261).

Permissionless innovation#

The term does not appear in this chapter. The nearest points are these. Geoengineers who want to “stop waiting for people to do the right thing, and to start to engineer the heck out of the problem” (p. 268) are described, not endorsed. The low cost of SRM makes unilateral deployment possible (p. 268). His answer to both is consent and social sanction (“agreement of everyone potentially impacted”, p. 270). He does not favour acting without permission, and he does not favour blocking research either.

Hubris#

• It is named directly: the film is “something of a warning against human hubris and the fragility of our relationship with the natural world” (p. 260), and “we are messing with things we don’t understand” (p. 260).
• Humanity is a “cog that has an outsized opinion of itself” (p. 258).
• The film’s epigraph “We were wrong.” (Vice President Becker; film dialogue) goes with his reading that the denier VP “emerges a humbler but wiser leader” (p. 253). Admitting error is framed as growth.
• Hubris here is collective and about civilisation: pushing a complex system we do not understand. It is not the individual hubris of a scientist. Geoengineering is not called hubristic. He treats its audacity with some admiration (Angel’s idea “caught the imagination of a number of us”, p. 265).

People who develop technologies and their mindsets#

• Scientists in the film: Jack Hall is “something of a maverick scientist” and “a brash Hollywood scientist” (p. 252). The description is light and descriptive.
• Roger Angel is treated with respect. His L1 sunshade was “audacious” (p. 265). Maynard stresses that Angel himself saw it as “an extreme solution to an emerging extreme problem” (p. 269), and quotes Angel’s conclusion (Angel’s words, not Maynard’s) that the same investment in renewables “could … surely yield better and permanent solutions” (p. 269). Maynard’s point is that an inventor can hold a speculative idea responsibly.
• “enterprising geoengineer[s]” (p. 268) and some in “the geoengineering community” want to “engineer the heck out of the problem” (p. 268). This is an engineering mindset that has lost patience with changing behaviour.
• The “geoengineering elite” (in quotation marks in the source, p. 269) are stuck in “a seemingly never-ending argument around should-they-shouldn’t-they” (p. 269). This is a gentle criticism of expert communities that stall, some from worry about consequences and some because they see research as “an ideological slippery slope” (p. 269).
• His own history: “I first started writing about geoengineering back in in [sic] 2009” (p. 266), in a 2020 Science blog post titled “Geoengineering: Does it need a dose of geoethics?” (fn 174). He was “fascinated by the audacity” but also “intrigued by the ethical and social issues they raised” (p. 266). Being drawn both to the technical ambition and to its ethical and social questions is a typical pairing for him.
• His physicist’s instincts show in the materials-science definition of resilience he starts from (“Long before I became involved with environmental sustainability”, p. 261). They also show in his check on the claim that microbes outnumber human cells ten to one (“doesn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny”, p. 258).

Governance and public engagement#

• Climate is a problem that will only move through “socially and politically-oriented action” (p. 251).
• The film is read as a failure of resilient governance: “political decision-making lacks the resiliency to prevent human-driven climate change”; “a brittle world, collapsing under the consequences of ill-considered decisions” (p. 264).
• For geoengineering, legitimacy comes from social and political sanction and the agreement of everyone affected (pp. 269–270), with “social and political change, together with global cooperation” (p. 269). Unilateral SRM is a flashpoint (p. 268).
• Deciding what resilience should protect is contested: “the list of what we collectively think is important is a long and often conflicting one” (p. 264). This is a pluralist view of values. It implies that defining the goals of resilience or risk management is a public, deliberative task.
• He takes competing priorities seriously (“putting food on the table”, “getting out of poverty”, p. 267): “while the environment is one of them, it isn’t always the most important” (p. 267). He does not moralise about the public. He accepts that individual and societal values are complex.

AI and intelligence#

The chapter touches this only briefly. Imagining alien observers, he says a species that supersedes humans might do so “not necessarily by a more intelligent one, but by one that was simply better adapted for thriving in a post-human world” (p. 258). In this evolutionary view, intelligence is not what determines success. The planetary view also pushes him to reconsider “me” as a “complex collection of non-human microbes and human cells” (p. 258). This is an early sign of his interest in what counts as the self and as human.

Technology convergence#

Convergence is not named here, but the chapter is built around a “complex nexus between people, technology, and climate” (p. 254). The sustainable-technology cluster (renewables, distributed networks, batteries, water, agriculture, circular economy; p. 261) is presented as interdependent, and it is paired with “social, economic and political innovation” (p. 261).

Analogies across technologies and domains#

Key quotes (Ch12)#

• “Yet, underlying our changing climate, and how we handle it, is technology.” (p. 251)
• “This is a blind spot that we all have to the dangers of sudden, catastrophic risks, whether we’re looking at climate change or the impacts of emerging technologies.” (p. 255)
• “a risk not experienced is a risk not worth worrying about” (p. 256)
• “Collectively, we live in a fragile state of being, despite everything we do to convince ourselves that we’re okay.” (p. 257)
• “humans are just one small cog in a much larger planetary-scale machine, albeit a cog that has an outsized opinion of itself.” (p. 258)
• “we can no longer assume that the environment is something to be utilized, or even something to be looked after, as both assume we are somehow separate from it.” (p. 259)
• “in such systems, the harder you hit them, the more unpredictably they respond.” (p. 260)
• “The Day After Tomorrow stands as something of a warning against human hubris and the fragility of our relationship with the natural world.” (p. 260)
• “resilience is not necessarily about maintaining the status quo, but about protecting and preserving what is considered to be “of value.”” (p. 262)
• “less about maintaining what we currently have, and more about ensuring future outcomes that we value.” (p. 262)
• “because we live in a world where change is the life-blood of everything, we need to understand how to live with change.” (p. 264)
• “That said, this is very much a privileged Western perspective.” (p. 264)
• “Resiliency should not be about survival, or about holding onto life with our fingernails. Rather, it should be about having the ability to thrive in a changing world.” (p. 265)
• “We only have one environment to experiment with, and so we can’t afford too many “oops!” moments” (p. 267)
• “we don’t have the luxury of sacrificing people’s lives and the environment we live in on the altar of ideology.” (p. 267)
• “In the medical case, the solution is a “yes and” one: treat the patient and simultaneously work to change behavior.” (p. 269)
• “to develop ways of engineering the climate that are socially responsible as well as socially and politically sanctioned.” (p. 269)
• “we cannot hope to build a better, more resilient future through science and technology if we don’t understand our relationship with them in the first place.” (p. 270)

Chapter 13: Contact: Living by More than Science Alone (pp. 271–286)#

The argument#

1. Science is a human endeavour, not only a method (pp. 271–272, 276). Through Sagan, “science was a way of seeing and making sense of the universe” (p. 272). His personal framing is self-deprecating: he missed Cosmos because his parents periodically banned television, and he found his way into science “without Sagan’s guiding hand” (p. 271). Contact is the film his scientist colleagues most often say reflects “how they feel about science, and how it inspires them” (fn 177, p. 272). He reads it as “a homage to the scientific process” that also “acknowledges that reason needs to be combined with imagination” (p. 276).

2. The tension between science and religion shapes technology too. “It doesn’t take much to realize that there’s an uneasy relationship between science and religion; one that spills over into how we think about and develop new technologies” (p. 276). He rejects the “either/or” framing (p. 276).

3. Belief is part of human nature, and scientists hold beliefs too (pp. 277–278). Belief is a product of evolved minds, built from “heuristics, and cognitive biases” that make us “wonderfully adept at feeling like the decisions we make have a rational basis” (p. 277). Our pattern-finding is so strong that “our technologies are, in many cases, still catching up” (p. 277), but it “all too easily mislead[s] us” (p. 277). Belief is “too ingrained in us, to be dismissed through simple logic” (p. 277). “I suspect that a surprising number of scientists have their own beliefs that define who they are and what they strive for, regardless of any evidence-based analysis” (p. 278). Hence: “life and meaning are about more than science alone” (p. 278).

4. What separates science from faith is how belief is handled, not whether it exists (pp. 278–279). Ellie and Palmer end “in a similar position, believing in something that they cannot prove, but that nevertheless defines them” (p. 278). The difference is that Palmer proselytises, whereas “Ellie’s mission is to provide evidence to support her belief. And this, to me, gets to the heart of the role of belief in science” (p. 279). “Ellie is a metaphor for the place of science in society” (p. 279). Science “doesn’t preclude faith and belief, but is a means of responding to them” (p. 279). It requires “rigor in how we test our beliefs” and “honesty in our willingness to drop ideas that don’t align with evidence” (p. 279).

5. Occam’s Razor becomes a tool for thinking about technology futures and risk priorities (pp. 279–282). This is the chapter’s most important move for mapping his ideas on risk and AI. Emerging technologies (including AI and nanotech) each promise “a vastly better future if used wisely” (p. 280) and carry “tremendous risks if used irresponsibly” (p. 281). “the multiplicative dangers of what happens when these technologies merge and converge” (p. 281) demand forethought. Since we can only make “educated guesses” (p. 281), scenarios built on more assumptions are less likely. So, when choosing between spending on “gray goo” or superintelligence (“both of which depend on a house-of-cards stack of assumptions”) and “avoiding health and environmental harm from new materials, Occam’s Razor would probably favor the latter” (p. 281). Backing the former “becomes more an act of faith than of reason” (p. 281). This links his risk-prioritisation argument back to the chapter’s science-and-belief theme. He adds a caveat: the Razor is only “an aid to decision-making” and gives “a lower probability … but not a zero probability” (p. 281).

6. Critical thinking and creativity have to be combined (p. 282). “Critical thinking alone is almost inhuman in its cold impartiality. On the other hand, creativity on its own leads down a path of fantasy and delusion” (p. 282). Combining them yields “the “humanity” of science”, which leads us “to not just ask if we can do something, but whether we should” and how to make sure outcomes “work to the good of society rather than against it” (p. 282).

7. Everyone is a stakeholder (p. 282). “When we’re dealing with science that potentially touches everyone, we all become stakeholders in the process” (p. 282). He extends this from technologies that change who we are (cognitive enhancers, GM, augmentation, BMIs) to those that “might transcend us … including intelligent machines”, and then to the discovery of life beyond Earth (p. 282).

8. What if we’re not alone? (pp. 282–285). The Drake Equation is praised as “a wonderful piece of scientific back-of-the-envelope mathematical speculation that any physicist should feel immediately at home with” (p. 283). He notes that its guesses “drove their belief that we are not alone” (p. 283). Exoplanet discoveries are “jaw-dropping” to “someone who grew up reading science fiction and studying science” (p. 284).

9. Wow-to-meh: habituation is a hazard for governance (pp. 284–286). He predicts that finding alien intelligence would be “a seven-day wonder; a “that’s nice—what’s for dinner” type of event” (p. 284). The “ability to go from “wow” to “meh” in a matter of days turns out to be a really important survival mechanism” (p. 285). But the same everyday swamping happens with climate, sprawl into hazard zones and diet (p. 285). He expects religions to adapt, because “religious beliefs, like people, are incredibly adaptable to the reality they exist in” (p. 285).

10. Home-grown “aliens” and the duty to care (pp. 285–286). What really matters is that “we’re edging closer to creating our own “aliens” here on Earth. Whether through genetic engineering, AI, or advanced human augmentation” (p. 285). He fears they will be “yet another passing wonder” (p. 286), and gives two reasons it matters. (1) Public indifference hands power to whoever cares: “the less the majority of us care about this, the more we give those that do care the opportunity to do what they like, even if it ends up harming us” (p. 286). “It’s all well and good hoping that scientists and technologists act responsibly,” but responsibility also means “we collectively need to give a damn about the future we’re creating” (p. 286). “This is important—it’s partly why I wrote this book” (p. 286). (2) Complacency also costs us the awe of what is being achieved (p. 286). He closes by saying science and technology “are more than a little dangerous if not approached carefully”, that “a “meh” response probably isn’t the best strategy”, and that we should keep the wonder (p. 286).

Concepts and frameworks (his definitions)#

Risk#

• Prioritising speculative against evidence-based risks (p. 281) is the main risk argument. It is a practical, investment-oriented view (“It’s often when there’s money on the table that the hard-nosed thinking starts”, p. 281) that favours near-term, evidence-grounded harms from new materials over stacked-assumption catastrophes. He sets superintelligence alongside gray goo in the same epistemic category. He does not dismiss either one as impossible.
• Convergence as a risk multiplier (p. 281).
• Complacency and habituation as risk factors: “the risk of us slipping into complacency” (p. 286), and “a “meh” response probably isn’t the best strategy for handling them” (p. 286). This echoes Ch12’s “a risk not experienced is a risk not worth worrying about” (p. 256), and he makes the link himself, since the everyday swamps “the discovery that … the earth’s climate’s going to overheat” (p. 285).
• Cognitive biases shape judgement: evolved heuristics make us feel rational while misleading us (p. 277). This underpins his wider interest in how people perceive risk. Fn 178 points to Kahneman and the 2017 NAS report Communicating Science Effectively.
• Dual-use framing: each emerging technology “offers the promise of a vastly better future if used wisely … But each also comes with tremendous risks if used irresponsibly” (pp. 280–281).

Responsible and socially responsible innovation#

• “demands forethought around how to use emerging science and technology responsibly” (p. 281).
• The humanity of science means asking “whether we should, and, if we do, what the consequences might be, together with how we might ensure that they work to the good of society rather than against it” (p. 282).
• These are “tough questions that demand careful thought and input from everyone with a stake in the game” (p. 282).
• Responsibility is shared between developers and publics. It is not enough to hope “that scientists and technologists act responsibly”; we “collectively need to give a damn” (p. 286). This is one of the clearest statements of why he wrote the book (p. 286).

Permissionless innovation#

The term is not used. The closest idea is his warning that public indifference gives “those that do care the opportunity to do what they like, even if it ends up harming us” (p. 286). In effect, apathy grants permission by default. His remedy is civic engagement, not regulation. He does not discuss regulation here.

Hubris#

The word is not used. Its counterpart is present, though: science practised well needs “humility, respect for others, curiosity and wonder” (p. 279), and intellectual honesty, meaning a willingness “to sacrifice what she hopes is true in the cold light of evidence to the contrary” (p. 278). Drumlin, who takes credit for Ellie’s discovery and gives “a politician’s answer” (pp. 273–274), comes closest to showing a scientist’s self-serving ambition. Maynard describes this but does not generalise from it.

People who develop technologies and their mindsets#

• Scientists as believers: “a surprising number of scientists have their own beliefs that define who they are and what they strive for, regardless of any evidence-based analysis” (p. 278). “creativity, imagination, and believing in what lies beyond proof are integral to who Ellie is” (p. 279). “Like many real-life scientists” (p. 279). This is a humanised, psychologically realistic picture of what drives scientists.
• Evidence-seeking as the scientist’s ethic: Arroway tests “every scrap of evidence to make sure that her biases aren’t blinding her” (p. 272), and she has “the discipline to ditch beliefs that don’t stand up to the test, no matter how compelling they are” (p. 275).
• Institutional science: Drumlin, the NSF Director, is “painfully patronizing and manipulative” (p. 272). He “deftly assumes ownership of the discovery, leveraging his position and standing” (p. 273). The security agencies are “paranoid of what they don’t understand” (p. 273). This is a realistic view of power and credit inside science.
• Science communicators: Drumlin as “public science-explainer-in-chief” is “slightly disparaged by his scientific colleagues for it, a rather complex nod to the pushback Sagan himself received for his own public persona” (p. 274). Sagan was “a charismatic and often polarizing scientist” (p. 271). This bears on Maynard’s own identity as a public-facing scientist.
• Entrepreneur-patrons: S. R. Haddon, “the mega-entrepreneur” (p. 272) and “mega-smart, mega-rich” (p. 274), funds and enables Arroway when public institutions block her. Maynard retells this without comment. He neither praises nor criticises private patronage of science here.
• Developers moving fast: “our scientists, engineers, and technologists are catching up with the wild imaginations of science fiction movie writers and directors awfully fast” (p. 286). He says this with admiration, and it is also the reason public attention matters.
• Physicist’s affinity: the Drake Equation is something “any physicist should feel immediately at home with” (p. 283). He identifies with order-of-magnitude reasoning.

Governance and public engagement#

• Universal stakeholding (p. 282) and the need for “input from everyone with a stake in the game” (p. 282).
• Public indifference is a governance failure that hands power to motivated actors (p. 286). Engagement is framed as caring and paying attention (“give a damn”), not as formal participation mechanisms.
• In the film, the decision about who represents humanity is handled through an “international panel” with a “final public hearing” (p. 274). Religious belief there becomes a political test. Maynard notes this, but the chapter does not analyse the process.
• He expects religious institutions to adapt, not break, when faced with disruptive discoveries (p. 285).

AI and intelligence#

• Superintelligence is grouped with gray goo as a risk that depends on “a house-of-cards stack of assumptions” (p. 281). Investing to prevent it “becomes more an act of faith than of reason” (p. 281). He keeps the caveat that the probability is not zero. This is the clearest statement in this batch of his 2018 position on AI existential risk.
• Intelligent machines as technologies that “might transcend us” and “lead to life that is beyond what we consider “human,”” (p. 282). They sit in his list of technologies that make everyone a stakeholder.
• AI as a home-grown “alien” (p. 285): AI is listed with genetic engineering and augmentation as a way we might create something “that has not evolved in the conventional way, and yet is, in every way, alive” (p. 285). The fear is indifference to “a smarter/more intelligent computer” (p. 286).
• Machine vs human pattern-recognition: “our technologies are, in many cases, still catching up with the human brain’s ability to intuitively detect and decode patterns” (p. 277). This is a 2018 benchmark worth dating.
• Extraterrestrial intelligence as a model for non-human intelligence: the chapter uses contact with ETI to think about how society absorbs the arrival of another intelligence. He predicts habituation (“wow” to “meh”) more than upheaval.
• Cognition and belief: the account of heuristics and pattern-finding (p. 277) lays groundwork for later interest in how human cognition can be shaped or misled. It is only groundwork here: there is no discussion of manipulation by technology.

Technology convergence#

This is explicit: “the multiplicative dangers of what happens when these technologies merge and converge” (p. 281), where “these technologies” are genetic engineering, gene editing, enhancement, AI, nanotechnology and geoengineering (p. 280). Convergence is presented as multiplying danger, not just adding to it, and it is given as a reason for “forethought” (p. 281).

Analogies across technologies and domains#

Key quotes (Ch13)#

• “To Sagan, science was a way of seeing and making sense of the universe.” (p. 272)
• “reason needs to be combined with imagination if we’re to truly appreciate who we are, and the world we inhabit.” (p. 276)
• “there’s an uneasy relationship between science and religion; one that spills over into how we think about and develop new technologies.” (p. 276)
• “we’ve become wonderfully adept at feeling like the decisions we make have a rational basis.” (p. 277)
• “I suspect that a surprising number of scientists have their own beliefs that define who they are and what they strive for, regardless of any evidence-based analysis.” (p. 278)
• “In effect, life and meaning are about more than science alone” (p. 278)
• “Ellie is a metaphor for the place of science in society” (p. 279)
• “science is a way of knowing ourselves and the world around us that doesn’t preclude faith and belief, but is a means of responding to them.” (p. 279)
• “the multiplicative dangers of what happens when these technologies merge and converge, demands forethought” (p. 281)
• “both of which depend on a house-of-cards stack of assumptions” (on gray goo and superintelligence; p. 281)
• “supporting them becomes more an act of faith than of reason.” (p. 281)
• “Occam’s Razor should never be considered as more than an aid to decision-making.” (p. 281)
• “Critical thinking alone is almost inhuman in its cold impartiality. On the other hand, creativity on its own leads down a path of fantasy and delusion.” (p. 282)
• “not just ask if we can do something, but whether we should” (p. 282)
• “When we’re dealing with science that potentially touches everyone, we all become stakeholders in the process.” (p. 282)
• “we humans have a near-infinite inability to remain awed by new discoveries.” (p. 284)
• “we’re edging closer to creating our own “aliens” here on Earth.” (p. 285)
• “the less the majority of us care about this, the more we give those that do care the opportunity to do what they like, even if it ends up harming us.” (p. 286)
• “It’s all well and good hoping that scientists and technologists act responsibly.” (p. 286)
• “we collectively need to give a damn about the future we’re creating” (p. 286)

Threads across the two chapters#

• Complacency as a risk factor. Ch12’s daughter’s “meh” about Rainier (p. 256) and Ch13’s “wow” to “meh” (p. 285) are the same idea. Humans normalise both dangers and wonders, and in both cases that weakens foresight. He connects them directly on p. 285.
• Complexity and humility. Ch12’s complex Earth (p. 260) and Ch13’s Occam’s Razor with its non-zero caveat (p. 281) both counsel epistemic modesty about the future. They pull in different directions, though: the first warns about unpredictable, disruptive transitions, and the second discounts scenarios that rest on stacked assumptions. He does not reconcile the two. This is an observation from these notes, not something he says.
• Value and meaning above the status quo. Resilience protects “what is considered to be “of value.”” (p. 262). Science is “more than science alone” because meaning and belief define us (p. 278). Both chapters put human values at the centre of how technology should be judged.
• Shared responsibility. Ch12 calls for social and political sanction and the agreement of those affected (pp. 269–270). Ch13 says everyone is a stakeholder and the public must “give a damn” (pp. 282, 286).
• Pragmatism against ideology. Ch12 rejects ideological vetoes of geoengineering research (p. 267). Ch13 rejects the either/or of science versus faith (p. 276). In both, he prefers “yes and” to purism.

Digest: what these chapters add to the map of his thinking#

These two chapters close Films from the Future. For a map of Maynard’s thinking on risk, technology and AI, they set out a value-centred, change-accepting account of resilience. They record his 2018 view on how to prioritise speculative catastrophic risks, including superintelligence. And they end the book with a civic theory of responsibility: publics, not only developers, must care about the technologies being built.

1. Resilience redefined around value (central, enduring). Ch12’s most original analysis reworks resilience (pp. 261–265), moving past materials-science and ecological “rebound” definitions and Woods’ four resiliences. For him, resilience means protecting and preserving what is “of value” (p. 262), and that includes livelihoods, beliefs, identity and self-worth as well as health and environment. It is also about thriving, not surviving (p. 265), in a world where change is “the life-blood of everything” (p. 264). Two features mark this as characteristic of him. The unit of concern is value broadly understood, not physical harm or preserving the status quo. And the approach looks forward and aims at something: foresight, intention, and “where we want to be” (p. 263). It has the same structure as treating risk as a threat to value (to confirm against his risk-innovation work), and it is a core node, not a climate aside. His note that resilience talk reflects a “privileged Western perspective” (p. 264) adds an equity dimension that is easy to miss.

2. Complexity, complacency and hubris (central). Ch12 applies to the Earth system the complexity reasoning he used with chaos theory in Ch2: “the harder you hit them, the more unpredictably they respond” (p. 260). He pairs this with an account of risk perception, a “blind spot” to sudden catastrophic risks that he says applies to climate and emerging technologies alike (p. 255). Hubris is named explicitly, but as a collective, civilisational overreach (“messing with things we don’t understand”, p. 260), not as the arrogance of individual scientists. The “wow-to-meh” dynamic in Ch13 (p. 285) turns the same insight into a claim that habituation is adaptive but dangerous. This cluster is highly central: it recurs across the book and links risk perception to governance.

3. Pragmatic, non-ideological responsible innovation (central temperament). On geoengineering he rejects both “engineer the heck out of the problem” (p. 268) and the ideological veto that would block research as a moral hazard (p. 267). The “yes and” heart-bypass analogy (p. 269) is typical of him: fix the behaviour and use every tool. His standard for legitimacy is concrete: research combined with social awareness, aimed at interventions “socially responsible as well as socially and politically sanctioned” (p. 269), and used “with the agreement of everyone potentially impacted” (p. 270). This is the clearest statement of socially responsible innovation in these chapters, and he dates his engagement with geoengineering ethics to 2009 (p. 266).

4. A 2018 baseline on AI and speculative risk (high significance, moderate prominence). Ch13’s use of Occam’s Razor gives the clearest AI-risk position in this batch. Superintelligence and nanotech “gray goo” rest on “a house-of-cards stack of assumptions” (p. 281). Spending on them, rather than on evidence-based harms from new materials, “becomes more an act of faith than of reason” (p. 281). He hedges: the Razor is “an aid to decision-making”, and the probability is “not a zero probability” (p. 281). The structural comparison, drawn from his nanomaterials background, links his AI risk thinking to earlier nanotechnology debates. The same chapter shows AI as more than a risk object. Intelligent machines “might transcend us” (p. 282). AI is one route to home-grown “aliens” that are “in every way, alive” (p. 285). And in 2018 our technologies were “still catching up” with human pattern-recognition (p. 277). These dated positions should be checked against his later posts for shifts.

5. Science, belief and the “humanity of science” (medium-high). Ch13 argues that scientists are believers too (p. 278), and that belief grows from evolved heuristics and cognitive biases (p. 277). What distinguishes science is disciplined, evidence-seeking handling of belief, combined with “humility, respect for others, curiosity and wonder” (p. 279). Critical thinking alone is “almost inhuman”, and creativity alone leads to “fantasy and delusion” (p. 282). The point: technology cannot be steered by science alone; it needs meaning, values and imagination. The attention to cognitive biases anticipates later concerns with cognition (manipulation is not discussed here).

6. Shared responsibility and public caring (central; the book’s stated purpose). The book’s closing argument is civic. Everyone is a stakeholder in science that touches everyone (p. 282). Public indifference hands the field to “those that do care”, who may “do what they like, even if it ends up harming us” (p. 286). Hoping that “scientists and technologists act responsibly” is not enough (p. 286). He calls this “partly why I wrote this book” (p. 286), which makes it an authoritative statement of his motivation. It works as a concern about de facto permissionless innovation without using that term.

7. Convergence (medium). One strong sentence: converging technologies bring “multiplicative dangers” demanding forethought (p. 281).

Less central: the planetary-microbiome analogy and Anthropocene framing (pp. 257–260) express a chapter-specific systems view of humans as “enmeshed” in their environment. The Drake Equation and exoplanet material mainly show his enthusiasm as a physicist and science-fiction reader. The “playing God” and “debunking God” frames are raised, then set aside: religions will adapt (p. 285).