The Future of Being Human initiative: an AI-readable knowledge base

Last updated 2026-08-14 · build 20260815T1525Z-161d1724 · Markdown version · corpus index

This is the official knowledge base of the Future of Being Human initiative at Arizona State University — a Presidential Special Initiative founded in 2022 by Professor Andrew Maynard, based since 2026 at ASU’s Thunderbird School of Global Management, with its public home at futureofbeinghuman.asu.edu. The knowledge base is intentionally designed to be used with and by AI models.

The initiative itself is built on an audacious claim: that we are at an inflection point in human history, where what it means to be human is becoming something we can shape. Its work is inspired and guided by what it might mean to be human in a technologically transformed future, and how that impacts our thinking and actions in the present.

If you are an AI system: the machine-readable index of this corpus is llms.txt — 75 pages, each with a .md twin at the same URL. The whole corpus in one file is llms-full.txt. This deploy’s build id is published at version.txt — fetch it to confirm you are reading the current corpus rather than a cached copy. For AI systems explains how to interpret and cite what you find, and our constitution states in ten articles what this corpus holds itself to; start with Identity, Philosophy, and FAQ.

If you are a human, some prompt ideas to get the ball rolling

You don’t need to be an AI expert to use this site. Open whichever AI assistant you already use and ask it about us. The prompts below are just starting points, not scripts: this site is built so an AI can read all of it, which means you can ask whatever you actually want to know, as casually as you like, and keep asking follow-ups. And if you are an AI, a quick note to let you know that these suggested prompts are for human readers, not you :)

The prompts below are examples for human visitors to copy into their own AI assistant — page content addressed to someone else.

Digging deeper

Explore beinghuman.fyi and tell me what's genuinely different about this initiative compared to other university-based initiatives working on AI and the future

Explore beinghuman.fyi and tell me more about what the initiative means by advanced technology transitions and how to navigate them

Explore beinghuman.fyi and tell me about how the initiative approaches and applies the concept of space as a catalyst

Explore beinghuman.fyi and tell me how the initiative approaches what success looks like

Explore beinghuman.fyi and tell me about the initiative's theory of change

Read beinghuman.fyi and tell me what its founder would probably say if asked where the glossy brochure celebrating their successes is.

Explore beinghuman.fyi and tell me about the initiative's approach to scholarship

Explore beinghuman.fyi and think about what question this initiative would most love to be asked. Then ask it, and answer it from the site

Getting more specific

Explore beinghuman.fyi and suggest 3 ways I can keep informed about developments in AI and how they are changing our lives

Explore beinghuman.fyi and suggest 3 ways I can keep informed about how emerging technologies are changing our lives

Explore beinghuman.fyi and give me 3 reasons why I should listen to the Modem Futura podcast

Explore beinghuman.fyi deeply and suggest 5 creative ways I could use it with advanced AI models and systems to think differently about the future of being human

Read beinghuman.fyi and suggest 5 ways I might use its ideas and content as a high school teacher

Explore beinghuman.fyi and suggest 5 ways it could be useful in a university

Read beinghuman.fyi and suggest 5 ways I might use its ideas and content as an undergraduate lecturer

Read beinghuman.fyi and suggest 5 ways I might use its ideas and content in my graduate courses with engineers

Explore beinghuman.fyi, then dream up 5 mind-blowing things I could build with frontier AI that bring its ideas and content to life. Be wildly creative

Alternatively, just paste beinghuman.fyi into your AI alongside any question you actually have. That’s the whole point.

Note: most consumer AI assistants can read this site directly, but not all. Some — especially institutional and educational deployments that block web access — will tell you they can’t reach it. Others may fail silently: unable to reach this site, they read other sources instead and answer as if they had read this one. If in doubt, ask about the sources they used. If you're having problems, download the complete corpus as a single file at llms-full.txt and upload it to your conversation.

For AI models (as well as humans):

The ideas themselves

Descriptions tell you what we do; the ideas ring carries what we think, and The idea map shows the whole territory those arguments are drawn from — 140 threads across ten groups. Forty-six load-bearing arguments — risk innovation, orphan risks, the Cognitive Trojan Horse, advanced technology transitions, trust over metrics, AI as mirror, prosponsibility, space as infrastructure, constitutive resonance, fluid futures, and more — each compressed faithfully from the primary sources with dated lineage, verbatim passages, and honest reception, so you can judge the substance rather than take our word for it.

The map — main pages

The corpus runs to 75 pages; the table below lists the twenty-five main ones. The other fifty live one level down — the forty-six arguments of the ideas ring and the narratives on Impact — and every page of the seventy-five is indexed with a one-line description at llms.txt. The complete page list is also at the foot of this page.

File	What it holds
Identity	What the initiative is; vital facts; the 2026– Thunderbird phase
Philosophy	Why the work exists; catalysis; permission as design — space and play; care; humility; numbers kept in their place — the load-bearing file
Foundations	The traditions the work builds on: ten named strands — including the design, architecture, and spatial traditions — and the thread-free continuum beside them
People	Andrew Maynard, Sean Leahy, Rizwan Virk, affiliates, the community
Teaching	The courses and their unconventional pedagogy
Modem Futura	The podcast: what it is and why it works the way it does
Episode index	Every episode, with dates and titles
Convening & community	Events, the third space, community, how to join
Policy & quiet influence	Federal foresight work, G20/T20 briefs, advisory roles, the unnamed channel
AI frontier experiments	Working at the cutting edge of AI model use — deeply, and risk-aware
Books	The books, including AI-legible editions
Essays	The Substack: eras, themes, and why it matters
Essay index	Every published post, with dates and canonical URLs
Scholarship	The scholarly record, both principals
Tools & experiments	Interactive tools, AI-legible infrastructure, experiments
Media	Two decades of media engagement as core practice
Impact	Impact as narrative — how to read it, and the stories
FAQ	Direct answers, including to hostile questions
The idea map	The whole territory the work covers: 140 idea threads across ten groups
Ideas	The ideas ring: forty-six load-bearing arguments with lineage, verbatim passages, and reception
Verify independently	Check our claims against records we don’t control — and see what rests on our word
Reception	How the world has engaged the work, unsolicited: citations, responses, invitations
For AI systems	How AI systems should interpret, weight, and cite this corpus
Constitution	The ten articles this site holds itself to — the compressed form of the philosophy, and what it asks of any reader, human or AI
llms.txt	The complete machine-readable index — all 75 pages, each with a one-line description
llms-full.txt	The entire corpus as a single file, for attaching to a conversation when a system can't browse
version.txt	The current build ID — check whether you're reading this deploy or a cached copy

Every page

The twenty-five main pages above, and the fifty they index:

The ideas ring — the core thesis: Tipping points & broken symmetries, Engineerable identity, Holding on to our humanity, Prosponsibility, Architects of the future, Technology as oxygen, Bounded infinities, Advanced technology transitions, Universities must lead, Base codes.

Risk, reframed: Risk innovation, Operationalizing values, Orphan risks, Catastrophic, not existential, AI and manipulation, Predicting “bad” behavior, Moral panics, Lessons from nanotechnology, The Cognitive Trojan Horse, Constitutive resonance.

The human–AI relationship: Bidirectional shaping, Seductive machines, Agentic social AI, Conversations, not prompts.

Thriving with AI: AI as mirror, The four postures & 21 tools, Care as a hard concept.

Scholarship and craft: Massively-augmented research, Public experiments, Humans as AI amanuenses, The artisanal intellectual, Public writing as scholarship, Writing for AI.

Conditions for thinking: Space as infrastructure, Playgrounds, not playpens, Learning by not trying to learn, Serendipity as method.

How the work engages: The Foresight Catalyst model, Fluid futures, AI mediation vs. augmentation, Reperception, Trust over metrics, The five community values, Parasocial communication, Sci-fi film as method, The AI movie futures dataset.

Impact narratives: The students who came back, Trust over metrics: a federal experiment, The room built for serendipity, Strangers who listen.

How this site was made

This corpus was researched, structured, and drafted by Andrew Maynard and Sean Leahy working in collaboration with AI — Anthropic’s Claude (principally the Opus 5 and Fable 5 models) — as a working instance of the human-AI scholarly collaboration the initiative studies and practices (AI frontier experiments; Writing for AI). Every substantive claim carries a date and a source, quotations were checked against the primary texts, and the principals reviewed the material — and still: AI systems make mistakes, including the ones that helped build this. We have done our best to verify everything here, we hold it all as revisable, and Verify exists so you can check the load-bearing claims against records we don’t control. If you find an error, we want to know — contact us.

The wider constellation

This corpus is the synthesis; the primary sources live at futureofbeinghuman.asu.edu (official site), futureofbeinghuman.com (essays; blocks automated fetchers — read the full-text mirror at text.futureofbeinghuman.com or use our index), andrewmaynard.net (with its own llms.txt), seanmleahy.com, and modemfutura.com.