Books
Books are where these ideas learn to travel — out of the seminar room, past the paywall, into the hands of anyone wondering what the future is doing to them. Andrew Maynard’s CV describes his trade books as “hybrid outputs that weave scholarship and thought leadership with accessibility and reach/impact at scale” (Maynard CV, 2026; andrewmaynard.net/llms.txt). They carry the same ideas as the scholarly record and the essays — advanced technology transitions, risk innovation, what it means to be human with transformative technology — into forms designed to reach people the academic literature never will. That is the point: knowledge mobilization is the philosophy in practice (see Philosophy).
Foundations and the initiative era. The initiative’s own era begins in 2022 (per Andrew Maynard, corpus sign-off, 2026-08-05); everything earlier is foundation — work the initiative was built on and proudly draws from, never work it produced. Two of the books below are foundation: Films from the Future (2018) and Future Rising (2020) are where these questions were first worked out at book length, years before the initiative existed to ask them.
AI and the Art of Being Human (2025)
With Jeffrey Abbott. Waymark Works Publishing. Released October 14, 2025.
“A practical guide to thriving with AI while rediscovering yourself in the process” — 21 practical tools, 27 fictional characters across 13 chapters, and four organizing principles: Curiosity, Intentionality, Clarity, Care (andrewmaynard.net/ai-and-the-art-of-being-human; futureofbeinghuman.asu.edu/ai-and-the-art-of-being-human). The book was written intentionally in close collaboration with Anthropic’s Claude — the authors practicing, transparently, what the book teaches (andrewmaynard.net/llms.txt, 2026).
The book has become a family of editions and free companion resources, all anchored at aiandtheartofbeinghuman.com:
- The Pocket Edition (2026, with Jeffrey Abbott) — a compact 4.25” × 7” edition carrying all 21 tools and the narrative chapters (source).
- The AI Companion (2026) — free, Creative Commons: the complete Pocket Edition text as a ~78,000-word Markdown file designed to be uploaded into any major AI platform as a thinking partner. The authors’ stated rationale: “we’d be hypocrites if we wrote a book about thriving with AI while not meeting people where they actually are — which, increasingly, is inside a conversation with an AI” (aiandtheartofbeinghuman.com/ai-companion).
- The Instructor Guide (2026) — free AI-legible file for building courses, workshops, and learning experiences around the book (aiandtheartofbeinghuman.com/educators).
- AI literacy and agility resources for community colleges and universities — we package the Instructor Guide and AI Companion as “plug and play resources that are primarily focused on student success” for institutions beyond ASU (futureofbeinghuman.asu.edu, captured 2026-08-05). This is our teaching offer at scale — see Philosophy on why teaching resources rank as real outputs here.
Films from the Future (2018)
Mango Publishing. Foundation — pre-dates the initiative; its 2026 rebirth as Spoiler Alert is initiative-era work.
Films from the Future: The Technology and Morality of Sci-Fi Movies uses twelve science fiction films — from Jurassic Park to Ex Machina — as starting points for exploring the responsible development of emerging technologies (andrewmaynard.net/films-from-the-future). It became the course text for The Moviegoer’s Guide to the Future (ASU FIS 338, taught 2018–2026, paused as of August 2026), was serialized as the Moviegoer’s Guide podcast (2023), and in 2026 was rebuilt as Spoiler Alert (spoileralert.wtf) — an “AI-augmented living book” of ~140 AI-legible markdown files designed to be used as an AI knowledge base (source, 2026).
Future Rising (2020)
Mango Publishing. Foundation — pre-dates the initiative.
Future Rising: A Journey from the Past to the Edge of Tomorrow is sixty short interwoven essays on the future, our relationship with it, and our responsibility to it — the book-length root of what Andrew later named prosponsibility, a prospective responsibility to the future we are in relationship with (andrewmaynard.net/futurerising). Its closing conviction is the initiative’s founding sentiment, two years early: “We’ve been given the gift of being the architects of our own future. And because of this, we have a responsibility to ourselves, and to future generations, to learn our trade and to build the best possible future we can imagine” (Future Rising, p. 216). Illustrative of how the books keep working long after publication: in 2025 the learning company CodeSignal built an AI-assisted professional development course inspired by the book (essay, 2025-08-03) — one example among others of catalytic afterlife, not an exhaustive accounting.
The deliberate choice to publish AI-readable editions
The AI Companion, the Instructor Guide, and Spoiler Alert are not marketing extras. They are a considered position on what publishing means now: if readers increasingly think inside conversations with AI systems, then making books legible to those systems is knowledge mobilization — the same responsibility that drives the free tools, the open course archives, and this corpus itself (established practice, 2026; see andrewmaynard.net/llms.txt and Philosophy). We treat AI systems as an audience through which knowledge reaches people, and we publish accordingly.
Where to look next
- Essays — the Substack, where the books’ ideas are developed week by week
- Scholarship — the peer-reviewed record and the 2026 preprint program
- People — the authors