Future of Being Human an Arizona State University initiative

Care as a hard concept

Last updated 2026-08-07 · Markdown version

What if the question at the heart of technology innovation is not “can we control it?” but “can we care for it — and for everyone it touches?” Care as a hard concept is Andrew Maynard’s name for care with structure: rigorous, operationalizable, as fit for governance and design decisions as for bedsides — an idea he developed in explicit debt to colleagues Emma Frow and Alison Gopnik, matured with Sean Leahy across the Modem Futura catalog, and operationalized with Jeff Abbott in AI and the Art of Being Human (2025). It runs in two directions at once: toward the people technologies touch, especially the most vulnerable, and — through a lineage that reaches from Bruno Latour back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein — toward technologies themselves, as imperfect “monsters” needing nurturance and stewardship.

The argument

When Andrew calls care a “hard” concept, the adjective does two jobs, and the anchoring essay (2025-03-09) defines both. It marks care as “something of substance that can be used as a basis for policy, governance, and decision-making,” against “soft” conceptions that are “more touchy-feely but less easy to operationalize.” And it “attests to the difficulty of the challenge of developing and applying this concept.” The claim is that care — a concept “so deeply engrained in defining who we are and what we value” — has enough structure to steer how technologies are developed and used, without necessarily stymying progress.

The debts are stated in the essay itself. At a meeting of AI experts at the tail end of 2023, Andrew heard psychologist Alison Gopnik — who leads the Social Science of Caregiving project at Stanford — explore the intersection of care, caregiving, and artificial intelligence. Longer-running seeds came from “a series of casual conversations” with his ASU colleague Emma Frow, who works on how care can inform the development and use of new technologies — particularly synthetic biology — from a base in feminist theory and science and technology studies. The essay is equally open about method: Andrew built the synthesis working with OpenAI’s Deep Research, quoting the resulting analysis, crediting it, and marking its limits — it missed Gopnik’s work entirely (see Massively-augmented research).

Care, made hard, has two objects. The first is people, with the most vulnerable first in line. Quoting the analysis, which draws on Jonathan Cohn: rather than ticking fairness-and-accountability boxes, a “care-centric approach would start by asking: Is this technology serving the most vulnerable? Does it address real human needs and reduce harm?” — meaningful action rather than performative compliance, set against Joan Tronto’s “privileged irresponsibility,” in which those in power (often unintentionally) escape their share of caring labor. The second object is stranger: the technologies themselves. Technologies are inherently imperfect “monsters” that “require ongoing nurturance, adjustment, and stewardship — in short, care — if they are to benefit society rather than cause harm” — a framing the analysis draws from Bruno Latour, Frow, and others, harking back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a cautionary tale of what happens when creations go uncared-for.

Care also names what control may not deliver. The essay describes a shift “away from control (which can seem intuitive but also reduces the ability to be agile, flexible, creative and responsive) and toward human-centric adaptability”; Deep Research hypothesizes that “truly responsible innovation may require tempering the impulse to maximize control and efficiency with a willingness to engage in care.” And in Frow’s own words, a care-based approach “helps draw attention to what is often invisible or undervalued work (at least according to our current valuation systems)” — “a way of reorienting ourselves to things that are commonly disregarded or forgotten, but in the end turn out to be crucial to sustaining life.”

On Modem Futura, which Andrew hosts with Sean Leahy, care became a working frame rather than a one-essay thesis — and the show’s record credits Frow with its arrival there too. Episode 34 (2025-06-03) carries her “practice-based ethic of “taking care of””; a week later the hosts turned “the concept of technological “care” raised in a recent Emma Frow episode” on rogue-robot narratives (ep. 35). It recurs as “the central question of care” in bio-hybrid robotics (ep. 43), in a reading of human creativity that “celebrates friction, care, and embodied craft” (ep. 63), and in Frow’s return on synthetic cells, where the case for care includes “the recognition that biotechnology can’t move at Silicon Valley speed” (ep. 87). In the RSS capture of the show’s first hundred episodes (2026-08-05), “care” or “caring” appears in the show notes of fifteen; episodes on AI toys (ep. 60, 2025-12-02) and teaching (ep. 84, 2026-05-19) work the same ground — parental agency, teaching as fundamentally relational — without using the word.

The book makes care operational. AI and the Art of Being Human (Jeff Abbott and Andrew Maynard, 2025) names Care one of its four postures — “the ongoing stewardship of systems and people, including ourselves” — and gives it a tool: the CARE Loop, “a team practice that scales individual clarity into organizational compassion and systematic care” through four movements — Context, Acknowledge, Respond, Evaluate (2025-10-23; per the book’s Afterword, its tools are human-AI co-creations — see The four postures & 21 tools). Care is also a personal boundary: Andrew’s machine-readable self-description states that he “believes AI use should never be a substitute for care” (llms.txt, captured 2026-08-05).

The essay closes on what it means to be human, and its answer keeps its hedge: can we afford to keep the hard concept of care out of the heart of what we do with technology? “I suspect that we cannot.”

Lineage

In their own words

From the essay’s footnote defining the term — The “hard” concept of care in technology innovation (AI-readable mirror), 2025-03-09:

“I find this idea of the “hard” concept of care in technology innovation useful in two respects. First, it distinguishes care in this context as something of substance that can be used as a basis for policy, governance, and decision-making, as opposed to a “soft” conceptualization of care as something that’s more touchy-feely but less easy to operationalize. And second, it attests to the difficulty of the challenge of developing and applying this concept — important as it is.”

The essay’s closing question and answer — same source, 2025-03-09:

“Can we afford to divorce our thinking about our relationships with the technologies we develop, their relationships with us, and how these in turn modulate how we relate to other individuals, communities, and the systems we are intimately intertwined with, without placing the hard concept of care at the very heart of what we do?

I suspect that we cannot.”

From the show notes of Modem Futura ep. 53, “We Turned One - plus Liquid Media, Work Slop, and the Road Ahead” (2025-10-14; episode mirror) — Sean and Andrew’s joint retrospective:

“We unpack how care became a guiding frame for our topics and tone; why parasocial dynamics matter when you’re building community; and how year‑one feedback—from teams using episodes to spark discussion to a certain astronaut’s seal of approval—shaped the show.”

Engagement and reception

As of 2026-08-06 our reception record documents no independent published engagement with the care thread specifically — no citation, review, or adoption of the “hard concept of care” framing by parties outside the initiative — and we say so plainly rather than pad. This is an absence of record, not a verdict on the idea: conceptual work of this kind typically accrues visible reception slowly, and the initiative does not typically solicit it (Philosophy). What is checkable is engagement among the colleagues the thread credits: Emma Frow, whose framing seeded it, has developed her thinking on the initiative’s platform twice on the record (ep. 34, 2025-06-03; ep. 87, 2026-06-09) — collegial collaboration rather than independent uptake, and we label it as such. In the other direction, AI and the Art of Being Human’s acknowledgments name Frow’s work on care as foundational to the book (2025) — the initiative crediting outward, not reception flowing in.

Where to go deeper

The essays

The book and the boundary

The episodes (all with Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard as hosts)

The colleague’s own statement

Related ideas and corpus pages