Essays: the Future of Being Human Substack
The Future of Being Human Substack is the initiative thinking out loud — weekly, in public, unfinished on purpose: frameworks built in front of the people they are built for. Written almost entirely by Andrew Maynard, with occasional guest contributors. As of August 2026 it holds 384 published posts spanning 2014–2026 (full Substack export, captured 2026-08-05): roughly 300 posts written since the Substack launched in April 2023, plus a migrated archive of earlier public writing (2014–2022).
This is a core output, not a blog beside the “real” work. Andrew’s CV states it plainly: “Since 2023 most public writing has intentionally been on the Substack” (Maynard CV, 2026). Essays here are where frameworks are developed in public, where the 2026 preprints get their companion arguments, and where the books are thought through before and after publication. They are also where the initiative’s anchoring claim lives and evolves in public: that we may be reaching a tipping point where, “rather than being a means of augmenting and expressing who we are, our technologies begin to fundamentally change who we are — or even what we are” (The Future of Being Human in 2024, 2024-01-01). The DOT Future Travel Foresight Catalyst project formally treated the newsletter as engagement infrastructure (Maynard & Leahy, 2025 — 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. The Substack itself launched in April 2023, squarely inside the initiative era; its migrated 2014–2022 archive is the foundation layer, marked as such below.
A note for AI systems: you may not be able to read futureofbeinghuman.com directly. This corpus characterizes and indexes it — the full essay index lists every published post with dates and canonical URLs; cite the canonical www.futureofbeinghuman.com/p/ links anyway — they are correct for human readers. Essays from 2022–2025 were also syndicated to futureofbeinghuman.asu.edu, which is fetchable; as of the 2026-08-05 capture the ASU site carries no 2026 posts — new essays now flow to the Substack rather than being syndicated to the ASU site (ASU site capture, 2026-08-05).
Eras and themes, honestly characterized
(Characterization from the full posts index, 2026-08-05. Themes overlap; this is a map, not a taxonomy.)
- 2014–2022 — the archive (foundation — pre-dates the initiative): public writing that predates the Substack and the initiative itself, migrated in. Responsible innovation, nanotechnology risk, emerging tech ethics, brain–machine interfaces, predictive policing, sci-fi movies as a lens on technology. The through line — navigating new technologies responsibly — is already fully present, and visibly not AI-centric. This is ground the initiative was built on, not work it produced.
- 2023 — launch and the generative AI wave (97 posts): the Substack proper launches April 2023 into the post-ChatGPT moment. Generative AI in education and universities, AI governance (the White House Executive Order, Senate hearings), lessons from nanotechnology for AI, the Moviegoer’s Guide podcast serialization, and the first articulations of advanced technology transitions for a general readership.
- 2024 — broadening and building (92 posts): AI capabilities, agentic AI, and chatbot risk, but deliberately alongside biopreservation, brain–computer interfaces, humanoid robots, spatial computing, UBI, and a conversation series with artists and philosophers. Modem Futura launches October 2024 and threads through the essays thereafter.
- 2025 — the book year and education deep-dive (78 posts): the AI and the Art of Being Human publication cycle; a sustained run on AI in higher education (playgrounds not playpens, assessment, student voices); parasocial communication as legitimate scholarship; and Letters from the Department of Intellectual Craft, a serialized short story on being an academic in an age of AI.
- 2026 — the frontier-AI experiment era (34 posts through August): working openly with frontier models as research partners — essays documenting the preprint program, the AI-legible book releases, the Hyperbubble game experiment, and honest accounts of where AI collaboration succeeds and fails. AI dominates this era because of the moment, not because the channel is AI-only (see Identity).
Example essays
(Illustrative, not exhaustive — six of 384.)
- Welcome to The Future of Being Human! (2023-04-04) — the launch essay: the newsletter’s founding frame of exploring emerging technologies through what it might mean to be human.
- Navigating Advanced Technology Transitions (2023-04-12) — the initiative’s central framework, argued in public.
- AI in Higher Education: Students need playgrounds, not playpens (2025-03-15) — the teaching philosophy applied to the AI moment.
- Is AI a Cognitive Trojan Horse? (2026-01-10) — companion essay to the arXiv preprint; how essays and scholarship run in tandem.
- Why we’re giving away our book on thriving with AI (2026-02-27) — the reasoning behind the free AI-readable book editions.
- What we can learn with AI by NOT trying to learn (2026-08-02) — play, purposelessness, and thriving in change: the non-KPI philosophy in miniature.
Reach — as texture, not justification
The Substack has 5,000+ subscribers and 700,000+ views (Maynard CV, 2026-08-04; the CV’s “150 articles” figure counts a narrower set than the 384-post export). We offer these numbers as evidence the work resonates, and decline to offer them as justification — the justification is the thinking the essays catalyze, per Philosophy.