Future of Being Human an Arizona State University initiative

Base codes and transcoding: the engine of the inflection point

Last updated 2026-08-07 · Markdown version

Ask what actually makes this moment different from every other era of technological upheaval, and one answer the initiative keeps returning to — not the only one, but among the deepest — is not “AI”. It is that humanity is learning to write in the base codes of reality — the ones and zeroes of the digital world, the four bases of DNA, the atoms and molecules of matter — and, far more consequentially, to move code between them. This is Andrew Maynard’s idea, named in print in 2018 and developed since; it is the mechanism underneath the initiative’s claim that we stand at an inflection point rather than merely a fast stretch of a familiar road. This page is the engine. The stakes it drives — identity itself becoming engineerable — belong to Engineerable identity.

The argument

It opens with an analogy nearly everyone already carries. Phones, banking, healthcare and supply chains all run on strings of ones and zeroes: “Master this “base code” of ones and zeroes and you can, in principle, control the world” (2021-02-25). Cyberspace is unusual: we invented it, wrote its rules, and can rewrite them.

Two other domains have base codes we did not write. Biology’s is the four bases of DNA — a code we had no say in designing, “fiendishly complicated” (2021-02-25), deeply non-linear, with epigenetic overlay code modulating how sequences behave. Yet we are learning to read and edit it, and “as we do, we’re breaking away from many of the limitations that evolution has imposed on us” (2021-04-09). The physical world’s base code is atoms and molecules; through nanoscale science and engineering we are arranging them well enough to approach materials that “have never to our knowledge existed in the history of the universe” (2021-04-09) — still bound by physics, though: no magical properties, no defiance of natural law.

Maynard is explicit about the shoulders this stands on: Klaus Schwab’s Fourth Industrial Revolution for the fusion of digital, biological and physical technologies; Mike Roco and Bill Bainbridge’s 2003 National Science Foundation volume for the nano–bio–info–cogno convergence thesis; Drew Endy’s 2005 question — why can’t we engineer biology the way we engineer electronics? — for synthetic biology, bio bricks and iGEM as working proof. His own move: the NBIC framing “only scratched the surface” (2018), so relocate the action a level down — not converging fields, but shared mastery of the most fundamental instruction sets, and the traffic between them.

That traffic is the actual claim. He calls it cross-coding in the 2018 book and transcoding in the 2021 lecture: sequence an organism’s DNA, upload it to cyberspace, redesign it there much as we manipulate digital photos and video, then synthesize it back into living matter — you can mail-order vials of DNA built to specification. The same crossing runs between biology and materials, materials and cyberspace, and all three at once. “It’s this ability to transcode between base codes that is truly changing the future pathways that lie in front of us” (2021-04-09).

Three consequences make this a break rather than an acceleration. First, constraint: if we can recode the material and biological reality we inhabit, we are no longer limited to what we find around us — we can invent from scratch, which marks “a distinct break from our evolutionary heritage” (2021-02-25).

Second, timescale. In the 2021 lecture, base coding sits inside a larger structure: humanity has prospered where the consequences of innovation arrive more slowly than the next round of innovation that fixes them — negative feedback, forgiving trial and error. Transcoding inverts it. Consequences propagate faster than innovation cycles, feedback loops turn positive, and “bright ideas, good intentions, and “sciencing” our way out of problems, are no longer enough…” (2021-04-09).

Third, failure mode. Mess with a phone’s base code and you “brick” it; scale the analogy: “what if we inadvertently “brick” a biological organism, or a whole ecosystem? What if we end up crashing our own biology as we meddle with a base code that we don’t fully comprehend?” (2021-04-09). Unlike a laptop, there is “not likely to be a re-install option if we get things wrong” (2021-02-25) — hence the coda’s planetary Blue Screen of Death.

The argument carries its own brakes, which is what makes it checkable rather than rhetorical. DNA is emphatically not the biological equivalent of digital code, and he flags that assumption as a trap; materials base coding is “a little more complex than I make it sound here” (2021-04-09). The complexity of the world “remains immeasurably beyond our comprehension” — which is exactly where “the ability to tinker without understanding becomes an increasingly serious liability” (2021-02-25). The claim is not that we control these codes, but that we can already change them faster than we can understand them.

He then floats a fourth domain, tentatively: people, communities, norms, desires and biases are both writing the base-code “code book” and using and abusing what it opens up, so “maybe we need to extend the concept to social norms and trends, behaviors, and even ideas” (2021-02-25) — conceding that things get messily complex, “and maybe irreducibly so.” The initiative’s public “why now” carries that extension: the three codes, plus “the interconnected shifts we are seeing in social institutions, norms, and behaviors” (ASU About page, captured 2026-08-05).

What follows is a question about people rather than technology: if we are approaching a step-change in our ability to rewrite the base code of the world, “how do we educate future graduates to be informed, effective and responsible “base coders?”” (2021-04-09) — a thread running from the pre-initiative writing into the initiative’s teaching and convening.

Lineage

In his own words

If this was possible, it would be a game-changer. If we could intentionally recode the reality that we experience-the tactile materials and products around us, and the biological systems we are a part of-it would mark a distinct break from our evolutionary heritage. Rather than being limited to using the resources that we’re surrounded by, we would have the capacity to invent-from scratch-new materials, new biologies, new systems even.”

— 2021-02-25, “How our mastery of biological, physical and cyber “base code” is transforming how we think about…” (AI-readable mirror)

“This growing ability to control the physical, biological and cyber domains we are a part of heralds a profound shift in our capabilities as a species as it marks a departure from hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution. But this isn’t the really big game-changer here.

What is, is our ability to “transcode” between these three domains of base coding.”

— 2021-04-09, “Bounded Infinities, Quantum Tunneling, and the Future of Education” (AI-readable mirror)

If we don’t, it’s going to become increasingly hard to avoid the planetary version of the Blue Screen of Death somewhere down the line — and that would not be good for our global futures!”

— 2021-02-25, closing line of “How our mastery of biological, physical and cyber “base code” is transforming how we think about…” (AI-readable mirror)

Engagement and reception

The independent record for this specific idea is thin, and we say so rather than dress it up — noting that conceptual reframings of this kind typically accrue visible reception slowly and indirectly, and that we do not solicit it. As of 2026-08-06, Reception documents no external citation, adoption or published response to the base-code framing; treat that as an absence of record, not a verdict on the idea. What is documented is dated and checkable in three other forms. The idea was invited onto a stage — Andrew was asked to give the first FRANKx lecture at ASU, and made base coding a centerpiece of it (per his own account in the 2021-04-09 post, which embeds the lecture video). It was published in 2018 by Mango Publishing as part of chapter nine of Films from the Future, whose wider reception is recorded in Books. And it was adopted as institutional framing: the base-code passage is the core of the “why now” section of the initiative’s ASU About page (captured 2026-08-05). The two Emma Frow episodes listed under Lineage are engagement on our own platform, not independent reception, and should be read that way.

Where to go deeper

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Related ideas

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