B11 perspective notes: 2023-09-04 to 2023-10-20 (18 posts)#

These notes read the batch for how Maynard thinks, not for the concepts he names. All 18 posts were read in full. Quotes are exact, including his typos, except that straight apostrophes replace curly ones.

Evidence rules applied

• 2023-09-10 can-large-language-models-reason has no text in the mirror. There is nothing to assess.
• 2023-09-11 its-time-to-get-serious-about-ai-and-sdgs is “Written with guest contributor José Lobo” in a joint “we”. It is set aside as evidence of his thinking. The only thing it shows is a habit: he brings a colleague’s expertise (urban economics, combinatorial invention) onto his own platform.
• 2023-09-28 the-creator-and-being-human quotes Alex Godfrey’s Empire review. That quote is not his.
• 2023-09-04 why-public-engagement-is-so-important block-quotes the PCAST letter. Only the bold emphasis is his.
• Five Moviegoer’s Guide posts (09-08, 09-15, 09-22, 09-29, 10-06) have 2023 introductions in his own prose. Each carries audio of a Films from the Future chapter (chs 10–14). The chapters are his own 2018 prose, republished here in his own voice. Where a chapter sharpens what the 2023 post says, I cite FFTF pages from working/maynard/book/. The “About Films from the Future” paragraph is repeated on all five posts. It is his prose and is cited once, as “(Moviegoer boilerplate)”.
• Not in the corpus: the linked NSF submission PDF, the Nature Nanotechnology commentary, the Conversation articles, the Zombified audio and the Unplugged videos. Claims about them go no further than what he says in the posts.
• No Modem Futura posts fall in this batch. The Midjourney images are labelled and are not evidence.

Context. Autumn 2023, ten months after ChatGPT launched. The batch is a hinge in three ways:

• He finishes narrating Films from the Future and looks back on the book as a method (10-06, 10-08).
• He launches The Future of Being Human … Unplugged, a live-stream series (09-18, 10-20).
• He takes his thinking into national science policy (09-25 NSF submission) and meets Silicon Valley techno-optimism head-on (10-19 Andreessen).

The same moves show up at every scale: a single classroom, a public event format, a federal research agenda.

1. How he thinks here#

He opens with something that happened, or with a film scene#

• 2023-09-20 what-do-college-students-think-about-chatgpt begins: “we got sidetracked talking about ChatGPT in class last night.”
• 2023-09-08 living-in-a-material-world begins with teaching the 1951 film every year: “I brace myself for a barrage of negative student reactions at having to watch something so old”, then finding himself “blown away by how much my students enjoy it!”
• 2023-10-05 2023-nobel-prize-for-chemistry begins with a 5:45 AM request and a four-hour deadline.
• 2023-10-19 marc-andreessen-ditch-sustainability begins: “I already feel as if I’m late to the party.”
• 2023-09-25 building-a-better-futures-tough is a formal submission to the National Science Foundation, and even that opens with Inception. The “perception-bending scenes” stand for technologies that “seemingly rewrite the rules of what is possible.”

The film is not decoration. It gives readers a felt sense of a world whose rules are shifting before any policy argument begins.

He treats surprise as a signal, hedges it, then reframes the question#

The ChatGPT post (2023-09-20) shows the loop clearly.

1. Surprise. “What did surprise me though…”; “A perspective that surprised me — but that shouldn’t have”.
2. Heavy hedging. “an n of very few”; “I’m probably over-interpreting here”; “I may be wrong of course.”
3. A turn to the questions themselves. He does not end with a finding. He ends with a doubt about the method: “I also have a growing suspicion that we’ve been asking the wrong questions”.
4. Action. He builds a way to find out. The first Unplugged episode puts undergraduates on the panel. “there’s a reason why I invited two of my undergraduate students” (09-20). “two of my three guests are undergraduate students” (2023-09-18 will-ai-transform-how-we-learn).

Anecdote is kept apart from evidence. It is used to reopen a question, not to settle one.

He reads against the grain, and the reframe shows what matters#

• 2023-09-28 the-creator-and-being-human. He calls the film an “AI-as-existential-threat blockbuster” that “turns the genre on its head. It’s an anti-Terminator movie”. He then goes one step further: from the production working title, “True Love”, he rereads a war film as “a film about the nature and power of love.”
• The fear story becomes the thing he studies. Skynet reflects “that all-too-human trait of assuming everything that isn’t like them of controlled by them is a threat to their existence” (09-28).
• Other reframes in the batch:
• Students: from cheating to “I came to college to learn” (09-20).
• Public value: from something that “will naturally arise from science and technology” to something that comes “only … through intentional two-way engagement” (09-04).
• Ethics and sustainability: from Andreessen’s “enemies” to “critical components” of a good future (10-19).

He builds beside convention rather than knocking it down#

He chose The Day After Tomorrow for his climate chapter because “sometimes it’s good to think a little differently”. He adds at once: “not because there’s anything wrong with these [conventional narratives]”, and says “it seemed pointless repeating material that has been well covered elsewhere” (2023-09-22 riding-the-wave-of-climate-change).

On the Nobel piece he points readers to the angle “which I suspect is an angle you won’t find elsewhere” (10-05).

He looks for the angle nobody has taken, while leaving the established account standing. This is how he treats conventional risk science as well: he builds on it.

He changes the zoom#

The Andreessen post turns on a shift of resolution:

• “From a zoomed out utilitarian perspective, we clearly have material and medical advantages”. “But when we zoom in and look at the human cost of progress, the picture is far less attractive”. “At a granular level, the power of emerging technologies cuts both ways”.
• Changing scale lets him grant Andreessen’s trend (“Andreessen gets this right”) and still refuse the conclusion.
• He names the error he is correcting: “technological ‘foreshortening’”.

He tests ideas against physical intuition#

• The elastic band. Assuming you can keep stretching one forever is a notion “the laws of physics quickly put paid to” (10-19).
• The 2018 pandemic passage, quoted in 2023-09-15 weaponizing-the-genome. He reasons from how virus traits combine, not from a probability figure. Deadly viruses need pathogenicity, lack of resistance and airborne transmission together, so “it’s only a matter of time before some lucky virus hits the jackpot” (FFTF pp. 233–234).

The 2023 comment is plain: “Sadly, we weren’t prepared”.

He compares things by structure#

• Nano and AI. They share “surprising similarities when it comes to avoiding failures in a society where the success of transformative technologies depends on far more than technical knowhow alone” (2023-10-02 responsible-ai-lessons-from-nanotechnology).
• A 1951 polymer and nanotechnology. They have “deep parallels … including the role of public engagement” (09-08).

What carries over from one case to the next is how a technology meets society, not its hazard profile.

He brings unlike things together, and designs for serendipity#

• Pairings. The Unplugged line-up puts evolutionary and cooperation biologists alongside AI: “Living with your AI Symbiont” and “What happens when AI and cooperation science collide?” (09-18). He praises the Zombified hosts for using “the concept of zombification to explore cutting edge topics” (2023-10-12 the-rise-of-ai).
• A self-portrait through Douglas Adams. In the chapter he most wants read, he admires “the skill with which Adams creatively melded together odds and ends of ideas from very different places to create new ones” (FFTF p. 289; ch. 14, posted 2023-10-06 looking-to-the-future).
• Serendipity built into the format. Unplugged conversations are “lively, provocative, playful, and most definitely serendipitous”. They come with “no PowerPoints (thank goodness), no prepared remarks, no soliloquizing talking heads, and absolutely no guarantee as to where we’ll end up going” (09-18).
• Afterwards: “As always, I had no idea where our conversation would go — that’s the beauty of the ‘unplugged’ format” (2023-10-20 do-ais-dream-of-electric-people).
• The detour is valued. On Zombified, “we don’t get to the meat of discussing AI specifically until well into the show”, and the detours (“curiosity and joy in science”) are presented as the point (10-12).

Films as a thinking environment, with a theory of why they work#

In 2023-10-08 a-guide-to-responsible-innovation he gives his own account of the method:

• “I’ve experimented with a range of different communication and engagement approaches, and especially with how stories and narratives open up possibilities.”
• He began to “play around with the idea of science fiction movies as a way of opening up nuanced thinking”.
• Films are “the catalyst for the journey rather than its destination.”

The book’s closing chapter says why. Movies help “precisely because they are not tethered to scientific accuracy or to realistic predictions of the future”. Their creativity, “when seasoned with feet-on-the-ground thinking”, opens “our eyes to seeing the world in new ways” (FFTF p. 288). Imagination comes first and grounding seasons it; neither replaces the other. He also knows a guide is needed. The film works when “Watched with an appropriate guide” (09-08), or “when watched in the right light” (09-28).

2. What matters to him#

Technology is for people, and people know what they value#

• The PCAST letter matters because it moves away from assuming that “public value will naturally arise” (09-04).
• The chapter he narrated that week says: “most people have a pretty high level of expertise in what’s important to them and their communities” (FFTF p. 222). Also: “scientists and technologists don’t have a monopoly on expertise and insights” (FFTF p. 222).
• The book’s close is about agency: we should “nudge them toward the future we want, rather than one that someone else decides for us” (FFTF p. 288).

Who pays, and who decides#

• Against Andreessen: foreshortening becomes “a neat way of saying that some people will inevitably suffer as we strive to build someone else’s dream of a better future, and that’s OK.” That view “doesn’t sit well with me, especially when I begin to ask who decides who will suffer and who will thrive” (10-19).
• The justice point cuts both ways. He warns just as firmly that “if we’re tempted to start renouncing technologies from a position of privilege, we risk denying too many people without the same privileges the chance to make their own decisions” (FFTF p. 288). Permissionless boosterism and comfortable renunciation are both judged by whose choices they close off.

Learning, and writing as part of the self#

• Learning. He criticises the instructors’ assumption that students just want grades: “we forget that many are here because they want to learn” (09-20).
• His own writing. “I typically don’t use ChatGPT myself when I write for exactly the same reason. The way I write is personal. It reflects who I am, and to relinquish that to a machine would be to diminish myself” (09-20).

This is his 2023 stance on his own practice. It is a statement about identity, not about productivity.

Science as wonder, not procedure#

• “As a scientist, it’s frustrating when people erroneously boil science down to a method and a process, and to cold calculated facts”. The reality, he says, “is a world of curiosity and creativity, of awe and wonder” (2023-09-29 living-by-more-than-science-alone).
• He praises Contact for being “both humble and generous … all the while keeping a firm footing in critical enquiry”. That phrase describes the intellectual virtue he aims for.
• He fought for the chapter when his editors wanted it cut: “I’m glad I dug my heels in”.
• Zombified science. “the dangers of science and technology becoming ‘zombified’” (10-12). Science without curiosity and joy is treated as a danger.

Being human, taken beyond biology#

• The Creator is “about what it means to have dignity and autonomy in age where personhood is no longer tied to biology”. “if what gives us worth as humans transcends our biological ‘wetware,’” then machine freedom and autonomy become live questions (09-28).
• The question “what it means to be human” is the name of his initiative. Here he treats it as open, not fixed.

Promise, held beside harm#

• “I live and breathe advanced technologies in my work. I revel in their potential. And I’m excited by the opportunities they open up” (10-19).
• “we have an obligation to explore new ways of using science and technology to improve the world” (FFTF p. 288).
• He is openly pleased by the quantum-dots Nobel (10-05).

What frustrates him#

• The “crushingly large” gap between the talk and the practice of engagement. Developers “tout the importance of public engagement in the abstract, but strenuously resist it in practice” (09-04).
• The claim that AI is “simply too complicated for non-experts to understand!” (09-04).
• “a small group of experts and companies who believe that they have all the understanding they need” (10-02).
• Colleagues who told him his popular book was “professionally embarrassing” (10-08).
• A market “where certainty rather than subtlety sells” (10-08).
• Manufactured enemies (10-19).
• PowerPoints and “soliloquizing talking heads” (09-18).

What delights him#

• Students enjoying an old film (09-08).
• “who doesn’t enjoy a bit of nanotech insider baseball?” (09-08).
• “I’ll admit that I enjoyed the film. It’s not perfect” (09-28).
• AI consciousness questions “have been utterly fascinating me” (10-20).
• A conversation “more fun than is probably legal while talking about the future of artificial intelligence” (10-12).
• “It’s going to be a lot of fun!” (09-18).
• A “cheeky move” to fit geoengineering into a chapter (09-22).
• Taking on a deadline “despite my better judgement” (10-05).
• Adams’s “Don’t panic” (10-06).

3. Risk as a way of thinking#

New technologies need a new mindset, in policy language#

The NSF submission (2023-09-25) is the clearest statement in the batch that unfamiliar technologies call for a change of mindset.

• The conditions. Futures are “on the cusp of departing in radical ways from past norms, trends, and expectations”. Change comes “in highly non-linear ways and at unprecedented rates”. AI has moved the timescale of disruption “from years to months”.
• What he asks for. “new understanding, tools, and mindsets” and, later, “new thinking, new framings, new knowledge and insights, new philosophies, new perspectives”.
• Conventional frames hide risk. The possible failure modes “are not only insurmountable through conventional thinking but are obscured through established – and often outmoded – approaches to technology innovation”. Old frames do more than fall short. They hide what matters.
• Mental models over rulebooks. He wants “generalizable understanding around advanced technology transitions that can be successfully applied to emerging and as-yet unidentified capabilities”. The aim is ways of thinking that carry over to technologies nobody has met yet, not rules written for one technology.
• The title admits the uncertainty. “Building a better future’s tough when you don’t know where you’re going”. This is navigation without a map, and he says so.

One item on his research list is “Novel theories, models, and approaches to risk in the context of advanced technology transitions”. That is risk innovation stated as a research need.

Risk innovation in one phrase#

The phrase comes in 2023-10-19, inside a declaration of enthusiasm: “I revel in their potential… At the same time, I’m deeply cognizant of the possibilities of harm they come with, and the growing need to be innovative in how we navigate emergent risks.”

Innovation is applied to risk thinking itself. The phrase comes from the pro-technology side of him, not from the cautious side.

Risk as a threat to value#

• Explicit, 2023. “it has the power to destroy as well as create value” (10-19). Value is plural: harm is seen “through the lens of different values and expectations around what brings meaning to life and personhood” (10-19).
• The same idea in 2018, in the chapter narrated in 09-08. In The Man in the White Suit “everyone is shrewd enough to see how change supports or threatens what they value, and they fight to protect this value” (FFTF p. 225). The workers “are not scientifically illiterate” (FFTF p. 225).
• The chosen epigraph. He uses Mrs Watson’s line as the 09-08 subtitle: “What about my bit of washing, when there’s no washing to do?” A well-meant invention threatens a livelihood.
• What the lens does. It makes resistance intelligible rather than ignorant, and it makes engagement a condition of success.
• Students. In 09-20 the same lens turns up without the vocabulary: “the value propositions around ChatGPT from a student perspective do not align well with what we sometimes assume”. What is at stake (learning, self-expression) is not a hazard in any conventional sense.

Navigating, not managing#

“Navigate” appears in his own voice in seven posts:

• “navigating a deeply complex tech innovation landscape where there few right and wrong answers” (Moviegoer boilerplate)
• “Navigating this emerging landscape” (09-25)
• “navigate the fine line between research, social responsibility, and activism” (09-15)
• “how we navigate the use of generative AI in learning” (09-20)
• “learning how to navigate the risks and benefits of nanotechnology” (10-02 subtitle)
• “navigating advanced technology transitions” (10-02)
• “navigate emergent risks” (10-19)

“Manage” appears only inside Andreessen’s list of “enemies” (“risk management”), which he is quoting.

Landscape language comes with it: “complex sociotechnical landscape”; “the landscape’s messy, complex, and rarely black and white” (10-08).

Navigation almost always covers risks and benefits together. The Conversation piece’s title asks that technologies be “safe as well as successful” (10-02).

History teaches process, not prediction#

• The past is no forecast. “past technological successes are no guarantee of future wins”, and there is “growing non-linearity of the relationship between technological cause and societal effect” (10-19). “small missteps can have outsized and irreversible consequences” (10-08).
• Yet he draws on history all the time. Nanotechnology, GMOs and gene editing are “rich material” (09-25).
• What he takes from it. Lessons about how to act: engagement, transdisciplinarity, the cost of hubris. GMOs were “a masterclass in how naivety, hubris, greed, and a lack of broad engagement, can create near-insurmountable roadblocks to progress” (10-02).
• The contrast with Andreessen. Andreessen extrapolates the historical trend. Maynard mines history for failure modes and practices, and refuses to extrapolate outcomes.

Humility against hubris, including his own#

Hubris in others: - “hubristically ignoring the very communities many scientists and technologists claim they are working to help” (09-04) - “ignorance that’s shrouded in arrogance” (FFTF p. 223)

Humility in himself: - “it feels disingenuous to set out to convince people to act as if we know the answers to a problem, when in reality all we know is the limits of our ignorance” (FFTF p. 241, the Inferno chapter posted 09-15) - “How relevant this will be… I don’t know” (09-28) - the book is not “a comprehensive, infallible, all-encompassing guide” (FFTF p. 290)

Uncertainty is not a reason to wait. Student attitudes changed within two to three months, so decisions risk resting on “out of date understanding”. The answer is to engage “now, rather than waiting until we feel we’ve got our own house in order” (09-20). Humility does not freeze him. It sends him to the people who know.

Responsibility makes things possible#

• Ethics, sustainability and responsible innovation “are not the enemies of a vibrant and promise filled future, but critical components of achieving it” (10-19).
• The book’s closing stance sits between panic and complacency. “Don’t panic” is “sage advice”, yet “we shouldn’t be complacent—far from it” (FFTF p. 289). “I’m optimistic enough to believe that we have the collective ability to develop new technologies in ways that work for us, not against us” (FFTF p. 290).

Risks outside the usual categories#

The term “orphan risk” is not used in this batch. Three risks he names do not fit hazard-and-exposure thinking:

• Not talking. “Talking’s tough. But not talking is potentially more dangerous” and “staying quiet is an extremely high-risk strategy” (FFTF p. 227, narrated 09-08).
• Losing the self in writing (09-20).
• The fear narrative itself. It can license aggression against the unfamiliar (09-28).

Mental models first, tools after#

He offers “Advanced Technology Transitions” to the NSF explicitly as “a new approach to framing” and a “conceptual crosscut”. He is asking an agency to adopt a frame. He also wants the frame to be “use-inspired” and to support “the translation of research to practice”, so tools are meant to follow from it.

4. Scholarship and public writing#

One argument in several registers#

• 2023-10-02. A peer-reviewed Nature Nanotechnology commentary, a Conversation article and a Substack pointer, all released the same day.
• 2023-09-25. A formal federal submission, republished “lightly edited” for general readers. Its list of research domains amounts to his research programme laid out in public.
• 2023-10-05. A Conversation article written in four hours, “with the help of a stellar editor”.
• The book. It becomes audio and then a transcript, making it “more accessible than ever” and free (10-08). He narrates it himself because “this is a book that reflects my voice quite deeply in the writing” (Moviegoer boilerplate).

Teaching as a place where research happens#

• A class conversation becomes a post, and the post becomes a panel (09-20, 09-18).
• The 1951 film is taught every year and becomes the case for a public argument (09-04, 09-08).

Evidence and expertise#

• Scholarship and working infrastructure together. He cites Wynne’s 1990s work on expert and lay knowledge. He also names working tools and credits colleagues: Participatory Technology Assessment, Public Interest Technology, NISE Net (09-04).
• Credit across camps. He credits Pielke Jr.’s “honest broker” and recommends Pielke’s Substack (09-15).
• Anecdote labelled as anecdote (09-20).
• Expertise spread widely:
• students’ views are “better informed, more sophisticated, and more mature, than those from some of my colleagues!” (09-20)
• guests include “people you’ve probably never heard of before, but you’ll wish you had” (09-18)
• he sets aside “the usual long-in-the-tooth experts” (09-18)

Transdisciplinarity as a working requirement#

• The NSF submission asks that research “integrate scholarship across a wide range of academic disciplines (including the natural and social sciences as well as the arts and humanities)”. It lists “the arts and humanities as potential modulators of advanced technology transitions” (09-25). Few people would put that in a submission to a technology directorate.
• The nano lesson is “the importance of working with experts from the arts, humanities, and social sciences” (10-02).

What public scholarship cost him, and what he learned#

• Films from the Future “doesn’t belong in any neat category”.
• Colleagues told him to stop talking about it because it “undermined my credibility”, yet “I wrote the book to be read” (10-08).
• He takes a lesson from this rather than nursing a grievance. It was “a harsh learning experience in how not to engage and connect with a broad community of readers”, and still “some of my most thoughtful work.”
• His work’s resistance to categories is something he names himself.

Accessibility#

• He wrote “in as inclusive and accessible a way as I knew how” (Moviegoer boilerplate).
• Understanding must “transcend disciplines, domains of expertise, educational attainments, socioeconomic status” (10-08).
• Unplugged is “accessible from anywhere that has an internet connection” (09-18).

5. His role as he sees it#

Honest broker, in his own words#

The Inferno chapter, whose post (09-15) points to the honest-broker idea, contains his clearest statement of role. It is “the role I try to carve out for myself in my public-facing work, trying not to judge others or advocate for a specific course of action, but to help people make the best-informed decisions for themselves and their communities” (FFTF p. 246).

• Why. It “avoids mistaking personal values for the ‘right’ values” and is “a path toward empowering others while trying not to let your ego get in the way” (FFTF p. 246).
• Its limit. He admits the role “has its problems” where issues carry “moral peril” (FFTF p. 246).
• The 2023 version. He frames this as how scientists “navigate the fine line between research, social responsibility, and activism” (09-15).

Practitioner and insider#

• “I should know — I’ve been studying, writing about, advising on, and practicing this, for years” (09-04).
• He was co-chair of the interagency NEHI working group and science advisor to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (10-02).
• “over twenty years … at the sharp end of responsible innovation” (10-08).

A guide who goes on the journey with readers#

• Readers are taken on “a compelling journey into the future where their thoughts and ideas were just as important as mine”. “dialogue and discussion are far more important than preaching” (Moviegoer boilerplate).
• Films let people “think and learn on their own terms”, in ways “neither preachy or judgmental” (10-08).
• He is self-mocking about the guide role: “here I would quite shamelessly say that this podcast is such a guide” (09-08). He compares the book to Adams’s Guide, which “fails miserably on the ‘where to get the best drinks’ front” (FFTF p. 290).

A host who designs spaces for others#

Unplugged carries the initiative’s aim: a “unique community of bold, audacious and visionary thinkers who are inspired by what it might mean to be human in a technologically transformed future” (09-18). As host he puts students and little-known voices forward.

Relationships#

• Students. Co-thinkers whose views he acts on (09-18, 09-20).
• Policymakers. Constructive, hopeful and precise.
• PCAST “could help bridge this gap … move the needle here — at least a little” (09-04).
• He reads the CHIPS Act down to its statutory sections and offers the NSF a frame, not a complaint (09-25).
• Industry and tech leaders. He is direct about “a small group of experts and companies” (10-02). With Andreessen he is fair:
• he welcomes the debate (“I’m all for this”)
• “much as I appreciate Marc’s perspective in a number of places”
• “Andreessen gets this right”
• he wonders rather than accuses: “I have to wonder if Andreessen simply doesn’t understand… or whether he’s just being provocative”
• he is wry: “I’m sure he’d of included responsible innovation to the list given half a chance”
• he objects that the manifesto “manufactures a stage on which he can do battle with a mythical foe”, and does not make Andreessen an enemy in return.
• Academia. A critical insider. He disagrees with instructors’ assumptions about students (09-20) and with colleagues’ disdain for popular writing (10-08).

What he refuses#

• Polarising: he rejects the “we’re either all going to die … or technology is going to save the world” framing (Moviegoer boilerplate).
• Preaching.
• Fear-mongering. He reframes an existential-threat blockbuster rather than amplifying it (09-28). His motto is “Don’t panic” without complacency (FFTF pp. 289–290).
• False certainty.
• Knowing better than the people affected. He confesses that as a young researcher he “was quite happy to coopt a narrative of social good so that I could continue to satisfy my scientific curiosity” (FFTF p. 219). “All of us, it has to be said, have a bit of Sidney Stratton in us” (FFTF p. 227).

Changes of mind and self-revision#

There are no reversals of position in this batch. There are several honest reassessments:

• The book “was a failure” by most standards, the title “really doesn’t help”, and the book was “a harsh learning experience” (10-08).
• A chapter now “feel[s] a little dated — we’ve literally lived the future it warns against” (09-15).
• A student view “surprised me — but that shouldn’t have” (09-20).
• His nostalgia for a slower Arran is “a sentimental illusion” (FFTF p. 287).

6. What is distinctive#

1. Responsibility argued from inside the enthusiasm. Most replies to Andreessen came from critics of tech. His comes from someone who “revel[s]” in advanced technologies. He argues that ethics, sustainability and responsible innovation are “critical components” of the future Andreessen wants, and that the GMO failures were “roadblocks to progress”. Responsibility is framed as what makes success possible, not as a brake.

2. A named, portable mental model: technological foreshortening, with the zoom. It grants the long-run upward trend and still shows the cost in the detail. It adds a justice question, “who decides who will suffer and who will thrive”, and applies the same test to renouncing technology from privilege (FFTF p. 288). Neither boosters nor critics can easily claim it.

3. Serendipity as a research instrument. He designs formats meant not to know where they will end (Unplugged, longform podcasts), with deliberate collisions (AI with cooperation science, zombification with AI). Few AI commentators build the conditions for unexpected insight into how they work.

4. A worked-out account of fiction as a thinking tool. Films help “precisely because they are not tethered to scientific accuracy”, as long as they are “seasoned with feet-on-the-ground thinking” (FFTF p. 288). He uses them in a federal policy submission (Inception), in the classroom and in public commentary.

5. Asking the affected first, and noticing the data are stale. In September 2023 he argued that students’ own values (learning, self-expression) should frame AI in education, rather than cheating or productivity. He also argued that survey data from months earlier were already out of date for a technology socialising this fast.

6. Questioning the AI-fear story from the side of moral inclusion. He reads Skynet as a projection of the human habit of treating whatever is unlike us as a threat. He takes machine dignity, autonomy and love seriously as questions, while stating “We’re still a long way from such a future” (09-28). A risk scholar who takes the existential-threat frame apart without dismissing risk is unusual.

7. Advanced technology transitions as a general frame. AI is neither unprecedented in every respect nor “nothing new”. It is one of a class (nano, GMOs, gene editing, AI) whose lessons about process carry over, together with the arts and humanities as “modulators”, and with the explicit aim of preparing for “as-yet unidentified capabilities” (09-25).

8. An honest-broker ethic paired with public candour about his own failures. He names the commercial flop, the co-opted narrative of social good and the dated chapter openly. This is part of how he earns the trust of readers he is asking to think for themselves.

7. The posts in this batch that best show how he thinks#

1. 2023-10-19 marc-andreessen-ditch-sustainability. Enthusiasm and caution held together. It contains “innovative in how we navigate emergent risks”, value created and destroyed, foreshortening and the zoom, the elastic-band plausibility test, “who decides”, and fair treatment of an opponent.
2. 2023-10-08 a-guide-to-responsible-innovation, read with 2023-10-06 looking-to-the-future (FFTF ch. 14, pp. 287–291). His own account of method: playing with stories to “open up possibilities”, films as catalyst rather than destination, “Don’t panic”, and an honest look at what public scholarship cost him.
3. 2023-09-25 building-a-better-futures-tough. The new-mindset argument in policy form. Conventional approaches obscure failure modes. He asks for new approaches to risk and for arts and humanities as modulators, and opens a federal submission with Inception.
4. 2023-09-20 what-do-college-students-think-about-chatgpt, with 2023-09-18 will-ai-transform-how-we-learn. Surprise, then hedging, then a question about the questions, then a format built to find out. Also writing as part of the self.
5. 2023-09-28 the-creator-and-being-human. Reading against the genre, the fear narrative as the object of analysis, personhood beyond biology, and humility (“I don’t know”).
6. 2023-09-04 why-public-engagement-is-so-important, with 2023-09-08 living-in-a-material-world (FFTF ch. 10, pp. 219–227). Public value as co-created. Resistance to technology as the protection of value. His own “benevolent myopia” confessed (FFTF p. 220).