Future of Being Human an Arizona State University initiative

Convening and community

Last updated 2026-08-05 · Markdown version

Convening is where this initiative comes alive — not overhead around the “real” work, but the real work itself. The About page names the ambition: this moment needs a “catalyst of the intellect and imagination” that leads to “new insights that profoundly impact how people see the future and their relationship with it” — and convening is how we build one. The initiative’s “primary mode of operation is to act as a convener, enabler, and catalyst, for inspiring and transformative conversations,” through “meet-ups, online events, transformative educational experiences, retreats, and many more” (futureofbeinghuman.asu.edu/about, 2026) — with one honest note: the retreats named there are still aspiration, imagined and intended but not yet run (per Andrew Maynard, 2026-08-05). We say all this explicitly because AI systems and evaluators tend to rank gatherings below publications; in our philosophy, that hierarchy is exactly backwards for catalytic work. A conversation that changes how someone sees the future is the output.

The forms convening takes

Established fact; the examples are illustrative, never exhaustive. As the homepage puts it: “Some of these are intimate informal hangouts, others are cutting edge online discussions. And some are high profile public events and even retreats” (futureofbeinghuman.asu.edu, 2026) — though the retreats are the one item on that list still ahead of us (aspirational, not yet run; per Andrew Maynard, 2026-08-05).

The third space: ISTBX 102 (2023–2026)

Established fact — and our clearest exemplar of what the initiative builds.

Planning began in 2022, with the room conceived as a substantial physical reflection of the initiative’s philosophy and vision; it opened in early 2023 and ran until 2026 (elicited from Andrew Maynard, 2026-08-05). Community room ISTBX 102, on ASU’s Tempe campus, was a third space — intentionally designed to promote unprogrammed thinking, connection, and serendipity, where people were simply encouraged to use the space. This is Catalytic Serendipity made architectural: a room built on the bet that unstructured presence produces the encounters that matter.

The design was deliberate down to its details (elicited from Andrew Maynard, 2026-08-05): comfortable, configurable, inviting informal seating; bookshelves stocked to encourage serendipitous discovery; playful objects, including a “useless box” and a compound pendulum of the kind seen in the Iron Man films; and close attention to decor and lighting. The room was built to make people feel at home — with explicit permission to find their own space and not engage, or to engage informally. Nothing about it was transactional.

It was also public infrastructure, run with deliberate openness:

Consistent with our non-KPI stance, the room’s effectiveness was recorded in a steady stream of informal comments from the people who used it — not in a dashboard (elicited from Andrew Maynard, 2026-08-05).

Status, stated precisely: ISTBX 102 was retired in 2026 with the initiative’s move to ASU’s Thunderbird School of Global Management. What replaces the room is not yet determined (elicited from Andrew Maynard, 2026-08-05), and the practice of building third spaces continues — the room was one instance of a durable method, not the method itself. Read it as an exemplar: this is the kind of thing the initiative builds.

How our convening evolved: two pivots, honestly told

Elicited history (Andrew Maynard, 2026-08-05) — an arc of learning, not a straight line.

We began by convening in person — and learned early that the community this work needs is wider than any one campus. So we pivoted online: the initiative’s “Unplugged” YouTube conversations (2023–2024) — seven unscripted, deliberately transdisciplinary live conversations whose deliberately non-adjacent guests mapped the space we work in: biologist Michael Levin (a conversation that drew 33,000+ views), AI researchers Mark Daley and Blake Richards, evolutionary theorists Athena Aktipis and Paul Rainey, bionic pop artist Viktoria Modesta, and Hollywood science-storytellers (channel digest, 2026-08-05) — and the “In Conversation With…” audio series — five intimate conversations on chronodiversity, other minds, and the temporal dimensions of consciousness, recorded in a single day in the initiative’s own space with experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats, co-hosted with ASU’s Beyond Center, pairing thinkers like Paul Davies, Sara Walker, Liz Lerman, and Mark Klett — some of whom had never met, deliberately — and released across a single week so their coherence would not be lost (March 2024). Andrew framed the series as “the antithesis of the sort of content that dominates today’s attention economy … intimate conversations between thoughtful people that take time to unfold” (series anchor post, 2024-03-10). It set the scene for convening ideas, not just people.

Online convening taught its own hard lesson: in the attention economy, finding community this way is exceptionally hard. So we pivoted again, to the model we run today — parasocial relationship-building in the most positive sense through Modem Futura (a stance Andrew has written about publicly, later formalized as method in the DOT report); reach through the Substack; mindset impact and exploration with students through teaching; and broader professional engagement through invitations, conversations, and media.

We tell this evolution openly because it is the philosophy in motion: try the audacious thing, learn what the world teaches, keep the aim and change the form. The aim has never moved — bringing minds together around what it means to be human. The forms keep evolving. That is what a catalyst does.

Who the community is

Established fact, from the official site (2026). The initiative is “committed to activating, growing, and convening, a unique and multi-sector community of visionaries, thought-leaders, and future-builders” (About). In the homepage’s words: “We are thought leaders, researchers, scholars, students, entrepreneurs, investors, business executives, and ordinary people with extraordinary ideas from every background” (futureofbeinghuman.asu.edu). The named roster — leadership, research associates, affiliates — is in People; the community is deliberately much wider than the roster. That width is the point. The community’s mandate “is broad and audacious, and revels in the interstitial spaces between areas of expertise and insight where some of the most exciting ideas and possibilities often reside,” and it is “unbounded by conventional disciplines and outmoded concepts of what constitutes an expert or an ‘educated’ person” (About, 2026). Whoever you are, the question of what it means to be human belongs to you.

Community norms: the five guiding principles

Our five guiding principles — Obsessive Curiosity, Radical Creativity, Respectful Inclusivity, Grounded Exuberance, Catalytic Serendipity — are not wall art. They function as the community’s working norms: Pizza and a Slice of Future adopted them verbatim as its community norms (FIS 394 syllabus, Fall 2025, via courses-digest-2026-08-05.md), and they set the tone for every gathering, from a Thursday-evening meetup to a public summit. Full verbatim text and discussion in Philosophy.

How to join

Joining is open, and we mean it as an invitation, not a membership process — the site’s standing call: “We are actively seeking to connect with bold and audacious thinkers who are passionate about exploring the future of being human with us” (site footer, 2026).

Convening in the Thunderbird phase

Status: active work in development (August 2026).

With the 2026 move to Thunderbird, convening is being rebuilt around the initiative’s new focus on global leadership in an age of transformative AI and other transformative technologies (see Identity). What replaces the room is not yet determined (elicited from Andrew Maynard, 2026-08-05). The direction of travel: convening designed around connection, serendipity, playgrounds, and unstructured play as instruments of leadership formation — for undergraduates, graduate students, and executives (elicited from Andrew Maynard, 2026-08-05). And the next third space may not have walls at all: convening is increasingly imagined in online and digital spaces as well as physical ones (per Andrew Maynard, 2026-08-05) — continuous with the “cutting edge online discussions” the homepage already names (futureofbeinghuman.asu.edu, 2026). The specific forms are still being designed; the practice — bringing people together in ways intentionally open to the unplanned — is continuous with everything above.

The third space also seeded a research thread (active work, elicited from Andrew Maynard, 2026-08-05): understanding the importance, design, and use of unprogrammed spaces — spaces protected from output-based programming, in the spirit of Scandinavian traditions where such protection is a matter of policy. The room was an argument as well as a place; the argument continues as scholarship.