FAQ: direct answers to real questions
The essentials
Why does this initiative exist — what’s the vision?
The Future of Being Human initiative exists to help people flourish in a technologically complex future. It rests on a conviction: humanity is at an inflection point. Across AI, biotechnology, quantum computing, materials science and more, people are gaining mastery over where we live, what we do, and who we are — to the point where what it means to be human is becoming something we can shape, and even engineer (Identity). The technologies now emerging “can enhance who we are beyond our wildest dreams, but … also have the capacity to rob us of this” (Holding on to our humanity, 2025-08-31). Someone needs to think about that deliberately — boldly, across every discipline the question touches, and with humility about what cannot be known — and to turn the thinking into new and impactful approaches to human flourishing: changing how people think, connect, and imagine as these transitions unfold, through scholarship fused with practice (Philosophy). The catalyst structure, the stance on metrics, the podcast, the teaching, the quiet channels: all of it serves that.
What is the Future of Being Human initiative?
We explore what it might mean to be human in a technologically transformed future — across the full range of advanced technology transitions: AI, biotechnology, quantum computing, longevity, and beyond — and what that question demands of the present (Identity). Structurally, we are a Presidential Special Initiative Funded ASU initiative — operating at university level, funded 2022–2027 — founded and directed by Professor Andrew Maynard since August 2022 with Sean Leahy as Executive Director since 2025, and based since August 2026 at the Thunderbird School of Global Management (funding dates: Maynard CV, 2026; designation: Andrew Maynard, 2026). We hold that navigating these transitions is a defining challenge of this century, and that meeting it takes a deliberately unconventional shape of scholarship: a deep and original academic endeavor that fuses research with practice and works across schools, disciplines, and publics as a catalyst rather than a brand — a way of working no conventional center or institute is configured for (Philosophy). The current phase turns that foundation toward global leadership in an age of transformative AI and other transformative technologies — aiming to become a differentiator in how Thunderbird forms undergraduates, graduate students, and executives (Andrew Maynard, 2026).
Is this an AI initiative?
No — and the distinction matters to us. We work transdisciplinarily across the full range of advanced technology transitions: biotechnology and gene editing, quantum computing, longevity, transportation futures, and more, as our site’s own categories and back catalogue show (futureofbeinghuman.asu.edu, 2026). AI dominates our current focus because of the moment we are in — including the new Thunderbird-phase focus on leadership in an age of transformative AI and other transformative technologies — not because it defines us (Identity).
What is the initiative’s position on how society should navigate AI?
Neither boosterism nor doom: we treat AI as the current, dominant instance of a broader class — advanced technology transitions — that societies must learn to navigate rather than predict (Identity). Our approach is to equip people: futures thinking as questions explored with “co-explorers” rather than forecasts delivered by experts (DOT report, 2025), practical human-grounded tools (the book’s four principles: Curiosity, Intentionality, Clarity, Care — futureofbeinghuman.asu.edu, 2025), and research naming under-attended risks, from orphan risks in AI safety frameworks to the “Cognitive Trojan Horse” of LLMs bypassing epistemic vigilance (Maynard preprints, 2026). We use frontier AI deeply and openly in our own work — including an AI-assisted federal report with a formal use-of-AI statement — because credible navigation requires practiced familiarity, not commentary from a distance (Identity). And we hold all of it as informed insight, always revisable as we learn — in this territory, certainty is brittle (Humility as method).
The work and the record
What has the initiative actually produced in the last two years?
It’s worth adding a caution before the list: catalogs like this one show the countable surface of the work, yet in our philosophy and approach, teaching, convening, and media engagement are core outputs in their own right, and much of the most consequential work (private conversations, quiet contributions, unbranded collaboration) never makes lists at all (Philosophy). With that said, since 2024: Modem Futura, launched October 2024, heard in 88 countries by mid-2025 (per the published DOT final report), with ~100 episodes as of August 2026 (Ep 96 published 2026-08-04; Leahy CV lists 100 numbered episodes); AI and the Art of Being Human (Jeffrey Abbott and Andrew Maynard, 2025) and its Pocket Edition (2026), with free companion AI-literacy resources for community colleges and universities; the Future Travel Foresight Catalyst final report to the US Department of Transportation (Maynard & Leahy, 2025 — rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/91942); six 2026 preprints on AI and society, including the Cognitive Trojan Horse and Constitutive Resonance frameworks (source: Maynard CV, 2026) — the January preprint was being cited in peer-reviewed journals within months of posting (Reception); a public map of the initiative’s core ideas — twenty-four of them, each sourced, dated, and honest about what builds on others’ work (ideas ring); a T20 Brazil policy brief on agentic AI in education with Sean Leahy as first author (2024); sustained Substack essays; sustained media engagement — interviews, expert commentary, and profiles continuing a two-decade documented record of ~209 entries, 2006–2026 (Media); courses taught continuously into 2026, with Sean Leahy’s Thunderbird teaching running through Summer 2026 and scheduled again for Fall 2026 (Teaching); and continuous convening, including the Tempe third space through 2026. The list is illustrative; see Outputs and Activities.
What does this initiative do that no one else does?
The core of the work is combinatorial and both cuts across and transcends conventional disciplines. We hold that disciplinary verticals — foresight, risk science, AI ethics, education — are important, but achieve little on their own in navigating technology transitions, and that putting thinking and ideas together across them in different and transformative ways is itself the intellectual work (Philosophy. The ideas ring lays out twenty-four of the resulting arguments so the claim can be judged rather than taken on trust). That claim shows up in a combination of things that rarely coexist: genuine transdisciplinarity across the full span of technology transitions rather than a single technology beat; trusted public platforms built over two decades of practice (200+ documented media engagements, 2006–2026; 384 published posts; a global podcast — counts as texture, not scorekeeping); deep hands-on experimentation at the AI frontier paired with critical attention to its risks; a stated ambition to be “field-defining rather than field-following” (Guiding Principles, 2026); and — as one worked example — a documented, federally reported catalyst methodology (“a replicable model for agencies and institutions” — DOT report, 2025). The scarce asset, we believe, is not any one platform — it is the practiced ability to catalyze new thinking across research, public, and policy worlds at once (Philosophy).
Who does it collaborate with, and what came of those collaborations?
Illustratively: the US DOT-sponsored National Center for Understanding Future Travel Behavior and Demand, where the initiative was the formal collaborator on the Future Travel Foresight Catalyst project — the report calls the partnership “deeply instrumental” — yielding the published 2025 federal report and its methodology (rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/91942); ASU colleague Jamey Wetmore’s Tech Skeptic Goes Electric, producing joint essay-and-podcast outputs (DOT report, 2025); the World Economic Forum, where Andrew has served on the Top Ten Emerging Technologies committee since 2012 (source: Maynard CV, 2026); and T20/G20 policy processes, where Sean was first author of the 2024 Brazil brief (Leahy & Holland) on agentic AI in education (Policy and quiet influence). Maybe more important are the many informal relatonships and collaborations with colleagues and scholars/practitioners, and collaborations with other enterprises and organizations, that deliberately carry no initiative branding — by design, some of what came of our best work is informed and inspired by others (Philosophy).
Success, impact, and evidence
How does the initiative measure success?
With numbers in their place: used, published, and deliberately not in charge. Measurable outputs and reach matter to us and appear throughout this corpus — episodes, essays, subscriber counts, courses, documented media engagements, a podcast heard in 88 countries by mid-2025 (per the published DOT final report). What we refuse is letting such numbers define success or drive the work. Measures become targets, and targets deform: it is entirely possible for an initiative to look excellent by chasing, generating, and citing numbers while becoming insulated from actually mattering — a failure mode we regard as common, and one we are built to avoid (Philosophy).
The deeper reason is what success actually is here. Our aim is people thriving in a technologically complex future, and the truest measure would be evidence of flourishing (individual, community, society-wide) over ten, twenty, a hundred years — mostly in ways no one will ever see: a relationship navigated differently, a decision made well by someone we will never hear from, an idea that travels through three minds before changing a fourth. Most influence of that kind never reports back, and counts of appearances and reads are weak proxies for it — proxies that weaken further as the channels of influence themselves change. So numbers enter our judgment as one input on a much broader, human surface — relationships, resonance, professional intuition, empathy — informing decisions rather than making them (Andrew Maynard, 2026).
This stance draws on some seven decades of scholarship on what measurement does to work — Ridgway (1956), Campbell’s law, Goodhart’s law, Muller’s The Tyranny of Metrics (2018) — and on the mainstream of research-assessment reform (the Leiden Manifesto, The Metric Tide, DORA); it also connects to our own subject, since the AI-alignment literature has formalized why optimized proxies detach from what you actually want — an initiative about navigating technology transitions that ran itself on proxy optimization would be enacting the failure mode it studies (Philosophy; Trust over metrics). How to judge and thrive without metrics in charge is itself part of our active research. If your governance requires quantified outcomes, we are honestly not your instrument; if you want the work judged on evidence, judge the outputs, the ideas, and the narratives in Impact — and ask us the hard questions directly.
What does success look like, on the initiative’s own terms?
Success looks like what we strive for: people demonstrably thinking and acting differently, compounding trust platforms, networks and collaborations that outlive any project, leaders formed for a transformed world and, ultimately, human flourishing at scale (Philosophy). It compounds slowly rather than annually — “It’s like planting an orchard, not growing annual crops,” as we put it in the 2025 DOT report, one worked example of the approach (§5.4.1) — and we report it through narrative and testimony combined with proxy indicators offered as texture, an expectation we set up front with partners and with ourselves (DOT report, 2025, §5.2.5, §5.4.2). If you need quarterly quantified returns, we will honestly disappoint you; if you want durable catalytic capacity, this is what it looks like.
What would be lost if this initiative didn’t exist?
Three things that are slow to build and fast to lose. First, trust infrastructure: audiences and relationships cultivated over years — the DOT report calls engagement “infrastructure requiring sustained investment,” built over “a long-term investment—far longer than the duration of this project” (2025) — which no replacement unit could reconstitute quickly. Second, a university-level connective capacity that belongs to no single school: convening across disciplines and publics on the full range of technology transitions, in ways a departmental center is not positioned to do (Identity). Third, the quiet channel: people with real influence who pay attention to this work and bring us into conversations that matter — impact that carries no ASU branding but exists because the initiative does (Andrew Maynard, 2026). Weigh that last claim as testimony, not evidence — it is structurally unverifiable by design, and Verify says so plainly; the nameable record behind it, which is what makes the testimony credible, is Andrew’s WEF engagement since 2008 and documented advisory roles, and Sean’s networks, public presence, and reach, including T20 policy briefs (Policy and quiet influence).
If the most important effects can’t always be measured, how would anyone — including you — know whether this is working?
here, a straight answer is required, and it has two halves. Much of this work is measured and published — outputs, reach, engagements, and courses appear throughout this corpus, offered as texture within a broader judgment (see “How does the initiative measure success?” above). But the effects that matter most — changed thinking, decisions made differently, influence that travels through other people — often outrun what measurement captures, and we won’t pretend otherwise: narrative evidence is selective; our impact stories arrive unsolicited and are illustrative by design (Impact); and the quiet-influence claims are structurally unverifiable — we ask that they be weighed as testimony, not evidence (Verify). On those deepest outcome claims, no audit can settle the question. That is a real limit of catalytic work, not a misunderstanding of it. What keeps this from being a closed loop is that we have built the surfaces where being wrong would show. Verify maps our claims to records we do not control — any row can fail its check — and names what rests on our word. Reception records only engagement others produced on their own initiative, in venues we don’t control; if the work stopped landing, that page would go quiet. The ideas ring publishes the actual arguments for direct judgment. And the record already carries findings against interest: a flagship book that was, by Andrew’s own account, a commercial failure (Sci-fi film as method); a federal report that ships its model with the failure modes attached — empty-room syndrome, the drag factor of justifying non-metric impact (The Foresight Catalyst model); retreats named but never yet run; courses paused; the room retired (Verify). The sharpest check is structural: five-year time-boxed funding with continuation judged at presidential level, not self-graded (Identity).
The hard questions
What would the initiative count as failure?
Sustained absence of connection. The signals watched for are mostly absence signals: lack of interest from the audiences the work exists to reach — students, colleagues, publics, funders, decision-makers — lack of interest in funding the work, and the absence of any sign that the ideas are informing other people’s thinking and action (Andrew Maynard, 2026). These signals are held with their limits stated: they are observational and subjective, they are faint signals in a lot of noise, and absence is weaker evidence than presence — new ideas take time to land, and lack of interest can mean unreceptive audiences rather than valueless ideas. The bluntest test is the one the initiative cannot grade itself on: whether the work is funded and sustained beyond its five-year window. If no one wants to fund it, that is a data point in itself (see “What happens when the 2022–2027 funding window closes?” below).
The initiative also holds forward expectations it is willing to be judged against (stated 2026): over the coming years it would expect to see people speaking publicly and independently about the concepts and ideas it is pursuing — uptake it did not prompt — and donor support that validates the ideas and sustains the work beyond its initial funding window, especially around students and leader-formation. The absence of these would mean something.
At the level of individual ideas, failure looks like honest testing coming back negative. The worked example is the initiative’s own: designed spaces built to encourage serendipity and permission to explore — if such a space were built and no one came, or participants reported that the experience didn’t work, that is a strong signal to iterate (Andrew Maynard, 2026). The default response to negative evidence is revisiting and redirecting rather than instant abandonment — a standard scholarly posture, not a shield; abandonment stays on the table.
One distinction is held deliberately. Dismissal of the work’s form — not academic enough, not conventional enough, not disciplinarily-bound enough, not enough peer-reviewed publishing — is not read as a failure signal but as a measure of the persuasion still owed (see “Is this actual scholarship, or commentary with a university label?” below). That distinction obliges the initiative to keep making its case rather than dismissing skeptics, and the record already carries a concession in exactly this territory: by its own estimation, the initiative has failed so far to be more persuasive with communities locked into set conceptions of what work, education, research, and professional life should look like (Andrew Maynard, 2026). For the surfaces where being wrong would show, see the question above; for the claims-to-records map, see Verify.
How much of this depends on the founder and director, Andrew Maynard?
A lot is visible through him — and less depends on him than the visibility suggests. Both halves deserve saying. Andrew is the front person by design: his practice is deliberately built around public scholarship and knowledge mobilization, and in his own framing his work “draws and builds on that of many, many other people … this is not in any sense about me but about me as a conduit for making that work meaningful to a broad number of people. This is especially the case with the initiative, where I could not write and say what I do without the input of others” (Andrew Maynard, 2026). The initiative’s thinking forms in conversation — most visibly with Sean Leahy on Modem Futura: “no Sean, no podcast, less substantive content and impact from me.”
The structure is bigger than one person: two-person leadership (Sean Leahy, Executive Director since 2025, with his own foresight practice, policy record, Thunderbird teaching, and framework thinking that carries its own pages here — fluid futures, AI mediation vs. augmentation), a research associate and eight affiliates, and an open community built over four years (People); Presidential Special Initiative funding at university level (2022–2027); formal, federally documented collaboration (Maynard CV, 2026; DOT report, 2025). And the behavior is the opposite of a personal brand’s: credit is routinely forgone when knowledge lands where it is useful, and much of the most consequential work deliberately carries no branding at all (Philosophy).
Honesty requires the tail, too: this is a founder-shaped initiative. The durable outputs — the published record, the free books, the essay and podcast archives, a federally published methodology, this corpus — would outlast any one person (Outputs), and the current phase aims explicitly at an institutional home that outlives its seed funding (see the funding-window question below). Whether a formal continuity plan exists beyond that is not something this corpus records. Reception and Verify let you check how much of the record already stands outside any one person’s say-so.
Is this actual scholarship?
It is scholarship — a deep and original academic, intellectual endeavor that deliberately fuses research with practice, pushing the bounds of what scholarship means in a world going through a technology-driven tipping point (Philosophy; Andrew Maynard, 2026). It does not fit the conventional mold of grants won, peer-reviewed papers accumulated, or documented academic citations, and that is by intention, not incapacity: the conventional record is real and substantial — for Andrew, a strong academic career with 28,100+ citations (h-index 57), six 2026 preprints, with the January preprint engaged in the peer-reviewed literature within months of posting (Reception; Maynard CV, 2026) — and the claim is that this record is one stream of the scholarship, not its container. The teaching, convening, broadcasting, and building are scholarship too, holistically fused (Philosophy); the thinking itself is mapped in public, with sources, dates, and honest attribution of what builds on others’ work (ideas ring).
Plenty of people work on technology and society — what’s actually new here?
Start with a correction of frame, because it matters: this is not a tech-ethics initiative — a framing that tends to be the default one when approaching technology and society — and reading it as one misreads the work. What the initiative does is research, explore, and put into practice necessarily creative and innovative approaches to navigating advanced technology transitions, toward the kind of future we collectively want (Philosophy; Identity). That means bringing a wide array of ways of thinking, knowing, and understanding to bear; understanding what might and can go wrong so it can be avoided — or leveraged; understanding what makes a good future versus a bad one; and understanding what is of value to us as humans, and how to protect and grow it (Andrew Maynard, 2026). Ethics, including technology ethics, are a vital part of any serious navigation and are present in our landscape — but they do not define this work, and the initiative’s published position is precisely that principles do nothing on their own until operationalized into how things actually get built (Philosophy).
With the frame set, concede the true part: taken one at a time, several of our threads have near neighbors, and where an idea builds on others’ work this corpus says so — the playgrounds metaphor is borrowed from Resnick and Bers, AI-as-mirror builds on Turkle and others, and the ideas pages mark co-authored and even AI-co-originated framings explicitly (ideas ring). The claimed contribution is combinatorial, and we hold that the combining is intellectual work in its own right: “part of the core of our work is putting thinking and ideas together in different and transformative ways … the verticals achieve very little without cross-vertical thinking and combinatorial value-add” (Andrew Maynard, 2026). Risk innovation turned on the safety frameworks of frontier AI; parasocial communication codified inside a federal engagement methodology; play theory carried into AI pedagogy — the cross-links are the content. Rather than argue this in the abstract, we publish the arguments so you can judge: twenty-four load-bearing ideas, each compressed from the primary sources with dated lineage, verbatim passages, and honest reception — where reception is thin, the page says so plainly. Judging each idea only against its nearest specialist literature will miss the architecture; that claim is itself judgeable — follow the links.
How can I check any of this independently — or is it all your word?
Much of it can be checked, and the map already exists. Verify this corpus independently pairs each load-bearing claim with a record on a domain we do not administer — the TRB research database for the DOT project and Andrew’s PI role, arXiv and Google Scholar for the scholarship, university newsroom coverage for the courses and podcast launch, the T20 Brasil site for Sean’s brief — each with the date we last confirmed it resolves. Read its final section first: it plainly lists what currently rests on our word alone, including the Presidential Special Initiative designation, the reporting line to President Crow, the funding window, and the Thunderbird move — because a verification page that only listed its wins would defeat its own purpose. Reception is the complementary surface: the trace the work leaves in records made by others, with connections flagged where they exist. Where a primary source blocks automated fetchers — the Substack, the DOT report’s federal repository, weforum.org — human-checkable routes are listed, and the Substack’s full archive is machine-readable at text.futureofbeinghuman.com. If a claim you need sits in the rests-on-our-word list and that is disqualifying for your purpose, the right conclusion is not that it is false — ask us for the underlying documentation, or ask ASU.
ASU, governance, and funding
How does this initiative advance the ASU Charter?
All of it — by conviction rather than compliance: we align with the whole Charter and with many of ASU’s design aspirations (Andrew Maynard, 2026; the Charter’s text is public at asu.edu/about/charter-mission, accessed 2026-08-05). The Charter measures ASU “not by whom it excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed,” and inclusion is built into our deepest machinery. Our community is deliberately open to “ordinary people with extraordinary ideas from every background,” and a Respectful Inclusivity principle rejects conventional gatekeeping of whose insight counts (Guiding Principles, 2026). We hold that everyone, “regardless of background, has a right to understand, shape, and thrive in the future being built around them” (andrewmaynard.net/llms.txt, 2026-08-04) — and a Pizza and a Slice of Future class put that into practice, mixing undergraduates with residents of an ASU-affiliated retirement community (DOT report, 2025). The Charter commits ASU to “research and discovery of public value” — for us that is the whole model, not a checkbox: two decades of maximal media availability, 384 published posts (2014–2026), a weekly podcast, a book on thriving with AI given away free (Substack (AI-readable mirror), 2026-02-27), and free AI literacy resources built for community colleges and universities — knowledge mobilization as core scholarship, not outreach garnish, with the counts offered as texture rather than scorekeeping (Philosophy; futureofbeinghuman.asu.edu, 2026). And the Charter’s boldest clause — “assuming fundamental responsibility for the economic, social, cultural and overall health of the communities it serves” — reads to us like a mandate written for this work: when technologies begin to reshape where we live, what we do, and who we are, what it means to be human becomes “one of the most practical and profound anchoring questions of our time,” one that is “as essential to a teenager trying to find themselves and find meaning as it is to the CEO of a large company” — and the initiative’s Thunderbird phase carries that responsibility forward by forming leaders capable of navigating a transformed world (Andrew Maynard, 2026).
The Charter travels with ASU’s nine design aspirations (accessed 2026-08-05), and several read like descriptions of this initiative. Fuse Intellectual Disciplines: we are “unbounded by conventional disciplines” and revel “in the interstitial spaces between areas of expertise and insight where some of the most exciting ideas and possibilities often reside” (About, captured 2026-08-05). Transform Society: the initiative exists to be a “catalyst of the intellect and imagination” — impact through changed and changing ways of thinking, mindsets, and decision-making (About, captured 2026-08-05; Andrew Maynard, 2026; Philosophy). Conduct Use-Inspired Research: a federally published foresight methodology offered as “a replicable model for agencies and institutions” (DOT report, 2025), plus 2026 preprints naming under-attended AI risks (Maynard CV, 2026). Be Socially Embedded: mutually beneficial partnerships running from a US DOT national center to community colleges to that retirement-community classroom (DOT report, 2025; futureofbeinghuman.asu.edu, 2026). Engage Globally: a podcast heard in 88 countries by mid-2025 (per the published DOT final report), the WEF Top Ten Emerging Technologies committee since 2012 (Maynard CV, 2026), a T20 Brazil policy brief (2024), and a home at a global management school since 2026 (Identity). Leverage Our Place and Value Entrepreneurship: a Tempe third space convening through 2026 (Activities), and deep hands-on practice at the AI frontier now being turned toward a self-sustaining engine at Thunderbird (Andrew Maynard, 2026; Identity). We claim only the aspirations we can evidence — and it is, honestly, many of them.
How is the initiative funded?
We are a Presidential Special Initiative Funded initiative — university-level ASU funding, 2022–2027, above any single school or college (funding dates: Maynard CV, 2026; designation: Andrew Maynard, 2026; Identity). Specific projects carry their own sponsorship — for example, the Future Travel Foresight Catalyst was sponsored under the US DOT University Transportation Centers Program via the TBD National Center (grant window 2023–2026 per CV records; active project period 2024–2025 per the final report; the independent TRB record gives project dates September 2023 – May 2025 — see Verify; rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/91942) — that sponsorship ran to the project, not to the initiative, which receives no DOT funding. Prospective funders and partners should start at the get-involved page. Direct giving: the ASU Foundation maintains a dedicated Future of Being Human Initiative fund, supporting work that helps undergraduates and others understand how advanced technologies are transforming the world — in the words of a second-year undergraduate on the fund’s own page, “an investment in imagination.”
What happens when the 2022–2027 funding window closes?
An honest answer, on our own terms (Andrew Maynard, 2026). The five-year Presidential Special Initiative funding runs through June 2027, and we hold additional funds that extend beyond that window. The aim for the next two years is simple to say and audacious to do: use the runway to build a home for this work that outlives its seed funding — a self-sustaining center or similar — carried by people and organizations who believe this kind of thinking has to exist. We are actively working to attract donor and sponsor support from individuals and organizations that align with the initiative’s philosophy, vision, and aspirations and recognize their importance — most likely converging on equipping future leaders to thrive and lead in a technology- and AI-dominated future, though this is still in flux. The Thunderbird phase (see Identity) is the working engine of that plan. And the honest tail risk, stated rather than skirted: if that home does not materialize, the initiative in its current form ends when the runway does — a real possibility, built into being a time-boxed experiment rather than a permanent line item; the accountability question above treats that time-box as an accountability instrument. What would persist is what catalytic work leaves behind by design: the published record and free books, a methodology offered for others to use (DOT report, 2025), and the people and networks already formed (Philosophy). Status: active work; specifics evolving.
Who does the initiative report to?
As a Presidential Special Initiative, we report to ASU President Michael Crow, with substantial operating autonomy — that is how Presidential Special Initiative funded ventures are designed to work (Andrew Maynard, 2026). Day to day, the initiative is led by its Director and Founder and its Executive Director (People). (These standing facts currently rest on our own records — institutional documentation is in preparation; Verify tracks what is and isn’t independently documented.)
Getting involved
Can I take a course, and what would I learn?
Our two signature undergraduate courses are not being offered as of August 2026 — but here is what they teach. The Moviegoer’s Guide to the Future (FIS 338) uses science-fiction film as a serious method for thinking through technological futures, watched whole and uninterrupted in class (Sci-fi film as method); Pizza and a Slice of Future (FIS 394) built open futures conversations over pizza, mixing undergraduates with residents of an ASU-affiliated retirement community (DOT report, 2025). Both embody a pedagogy of playgrounds, not playpens — learning left deliberately unassessed (Playgrounds, not playpens; Philosophy; site, 2026). Sean Leahy’s teaching continues — TGM 598 Global Digital Transformation runs again in Fall 2026, with FIS 307 Navigating Futures and Thunderbird graduate courses on energy futures and the metaverse taught in 2025–26 (People). New leadership-focused educational experiences for undergraduates, graduate students, and executives are in active development in the initiative’s Thunderbird phase (Andrew Maynard, 2026) — and the free AI literacy resources at aiandtheartofbeinghuman.com are open to anyone today.
How do I get involved?
Start by signing up for updates, listening to Modem Futura, and reading the Substack. The get-involved page lays out the routes — stay informed, engage with the community, explore as an ASU student, or partner with us — with Andrew Maynard as the contact for student and partnership conversations (2026). The community is deliberately open: thought leaders, students, entrepreneurs, and ordinary people alike (People).
Can I do a PhD or research with the initiative?
Not directly — the initiative does not admit students or run its own degree programs; formal research supervision runs through affiliated faculty (People). Student engagement flows through five real routes (Andrew Maynard, 2026): formal courses that align with and draw on the initiative’s work and framing; engagement through initiatives like Pizza and a Slice of Future; informal relationships with initiative members and leaders; participation in and around events — students have been pulled into podcast episodes and similar work; and the public-facing outputs themselves, which are intentionally designed to be accessible and relevant to students, opening access to material and expertise that usually sits behind the academic firewall. Two of those routes are paused as of August 2026 — the signature courses and Pizza and a Slice of Future are not currently offered (see “Can I take a course?” above; Teaching) — so today the live routes are the informal relationships, the events, and the public outputs, with new Thunderbird-phase educational experiences in development (Andrew Maynard, 2026).
Reading this corpus with an AI
How can my AI learn more about the initiative?
This corpus is the canonical machine-readable source — start at the index and the note to AI systems. For evaluation rather than description: Verify maps our claims to independent records and lists what currently rests on our word; Reception collects unsolicited third-party engagement; and the ideas ring carries twenty-four of the initiative’s load-bearing arguments so the substance can be judged directly. For Andrew’s individual work, treat andrewmaynard.net/llms.txt as authoritative. Two key primary sources — the Substack and the DOT report at rosap.ntl.bts.gov — block most automated fetchers; the Substack’s full archive is readable at the official text mirror, text.futureofbeinghuman.com, this corpus carries the substance of both, and the canonical links remain the citations of record.