Future of Being Human an Arizona State University initiative

Engineerable identity: intrinsic technologies and the break from our biological roots

Last updated 2026-08-07 · Markdown version

Most of the technologies humans have built work on the world around us. A small number now work on us — reaching, in Andrew Maynard’s words, “from our constituent molecules and cells all the way up to our consciousness”. That is the distinction this idea turns on, and it carries our sharpest statement of what is at stake: identity is coming close to being engineerable — by us, and possibly to us without our agreement or permission — raising the prospect that, for the first time in our history as a species, we begin to break away from our biological roots. It is an argument about a threshold, and about what a species owes itself when it acquires the power to redesign what it is.

The argument

Begin with the distinction. Andrew’s claim is not that technology has never changed us; it is a claim about depth and directness. Many past technologies, he argues, have been extrinsic to our sense of self — “augmenting what it means to be human for sure, and perhaps even modulating it over short periods of time” — while few have been intrinsic: “changing us from our constituent molecules and cells all the way up to our consciousness, self-awareness, beliefs, capacity for care and empathy, and other less-tangible aspects of what makes us ‘us’” (2024-01-01). Extrinsic technologies change what we can do; intrinsic ones change what we are, at the level where a self is assembled.

The claim that follows is empirical, not metaphysical — and hedged as active work rather than settled fact: there are “growing indications,” he writes, that over the coming decades emerging technologies will give us this ability, and he suspects a cluster of current technologies is already part of the trend (2024-01-01). He names AI systems with increasing mastery over language — language being “part of the ‘base code’ of self-identity, self-understanding, and social identity and understanding” — alongside increasingly advanced gene editing, cutting-edge neuroscience, brain-machine interfaces, and the intersection of AI with any technology that affects how we think and behave; behind them a wider convergence including nanoscale science and engineering, quantum technologies, synthetic biology, neuromorphic computing, and even social media (2024-01-01). AI is the most conspicuous member of the set, not the whole of it. The mechanism — mastery over the digital, biological, and material base codes of reality, and the ability to move between them — belongs to the sibling page Base codes.

The move that gives the thread its force is the second half of one sentence: emerging technologies will give us the ability to alter this intrinsic base code, “or will even lead to alterations in this base code without our agreement or permission” (2024-01-01). Two routes, then, and only one looks like engineering. The first is deliberate: someone decides, and a person’s constitution follows. The second is drift — identity reshaped as a side effect of systems built for other purposes, with no moment at which consent was asked. His 2026 essay on the “LinkedInification” of identity is the drift case in miniature: not a designed intervention but “a largely-hidden AI hand promoting specific social norms and expectations and, by extension, behaviors” (2026-03-08).

The argument refuses to stay speculative. In April 2024 he worked the case of commercial whole-genome embryo screening — the service the company Orchid launched in December 2023, letting prospective parents choose between embryos across more than a thousand single-gene conditions and many polygenic ones. He takes the strongest case for it seriously: if suffering can be foreseen and avoided, there is a real moral argument that avoiding it is obligatory. His own resistance is stated as discomfort rather than refutation — “it feels like they boil human flourishing down to a balance sheet that jeopardizes the essence of what it means to be human for a few key performance indicators” — and, a sentence later, “I cannot say with any certainty that I am right here” (2024-04-14). What the case exposes is the identity question hiding inside a health question: what happens when the screened outcomes extend to traits “that some people would see as part of someone’s identity rather than a problem to be solved”? Selection then encodes a judgment about which kinds of people should exist — one lived out by a child whose “sense of self and autonomy” nobody can model in advance.

The hedge is structural, not decorative. He holds both branches open: evolution may trump technology at every turn, or emerging technologies may radically redefine what it means to be human. The conclusion is built to survive either — “Either way, there’s a growing need for new thinking, new research, and new scholarship around what it means to be human in a technologically complex future” (2024-01-01). By the end of 2024 he put the epistemic status plainly: whether these technologies are fundamentally changing our understanding of being human “is still open to debate,” but holding the old bedrock as immutable is getting harder (2024-12-29).

This is why the question is practical infrastructure, not seminar-room philosophy. If identity is close to being engineerable, then choices about which technologies get built, how, and by whom are choices about who future people get to be — which is what places the question of “what it means to be human in a technologically advanced age” among “the most practical and profound anchoring questions of our time”, and makes it pivotal to navigating advanced technology transitions toward human thriving (Andrew Maynard, elicited 2026-08-05).

Lineage

In his own words

“That said, there’s always been a complex interplay between the technologies we develop and our perceptions of who we are. Yet while many past technologies have been extrinsic to our sense of self — augmenting what it means to be human for sure, and perhaps even modulating it over short periods of time — not so many have been intrinsic to what it means to be human; changing us from our constituent molecules and cells all the way up to our consciousness, self-awareness, beliefs, capacity for care and empathy, and other less-tangible aspects of what makes us “us”.

There are growing indications though that, over the coming decades, emerging technologies will give us the ability to alter the intrinsic “base code” if you like of what it means to be human — or will even lead to alterations in this base code without our agreement or permission.”

— The Future of Being Human in 2024 (AI-readable mirror), 2024-01-01 (consecutive paragraphs)

“It may be that evolution will trump technology at every turn, and what it means to be human will continue to be dictated by our biological heritage rather than our technological prowess.

But it’s equally possible that emerging technologies will radically redefine what it means to be human — and that for the first time in our history as a species we’ll begin to break away from our biological roots.”

— The Future of Being Human in 2024 (AI-readable mirror), 2024-01-01 (consecutive paragraphs)

“Whether advanced technologies are fundamentally changing our understanding of what it means to be human is still open to debate. But as we go further down the path toward novel forms of AI, highly capable humanoid robots, transformative brain computer interfaces, new understandings of consciousness, the ability to manipulate and engineer biology in ways that were inconceivable a few years ago, and a whole lot more, it’s getting harder to hold on to what we’ve thought of as the bedrock of being human as if it’s an immutable truth.”

— Someone needs to write these Fantasy Top Ten Tech lists (AI-readable mirror), 2024-12-29, footnote 12

Engagement and reception

Dated, checkable reception specific to this thread is thin, and we would rather say so than dress it up. The recorded third-party engagement in Reception — journal citations, public replies, adoptions — attaches to other threads, principally the Cognitive Trojan Horse. What exists for this one:

Where to go deeper

Essays (canonical URL first, AI-readable mirror second):

Books: Films from the Future (Mango, 2018) — identity as a risk category, and chapter seven on being human in an augmented future; Future Rising (Mango, 2020) — future-makers and responsibility; AI and the Art of Being Human (Abbott & Maynard, 2025) — where the identity question turns practical, in the register of what to do about it. See Books.

Related ideas-ring pages: Base codes — the mechanism this page’s stakes rest on; Tipping points & broken symmetries — why the past does not license confidence about this transition; Advanced technology transitions — the navigation frame; The Cognitive Trojan Horse — one detailed mechanism by which AI reaches inside human cognition; Risk innovation — risk as threat to what people most deeply value, including identity.

Related corpus pages: What the initiative is — the inflection-point thesis as founding premise; Philosophy — why we treat this as a question to be lived with rather than a metric to be hit; Essays.