Foundations: the traditions this work builds on
The Future of Being Human initiative builds consciously on other people’s work, and this page maps that inheritance: the traditions, thinkers, and bodies of scholarship behind the ideas in the ideas ring, named so the connections the initiative claims on top of them can be seen and judged. Honoring what we build on is constitutional here — building on others is solidity, and the connections we add are our claimed contribution. The provenance of the work is held as everything here is held: dated, sourced, and ready for revision.
The shape of these foundations
These foundations are deliberately not lineage-shaped. They hold two kinds of inheritance at once.
The first is a set of named traditions consciously built on — nine, from risk science and responsible innovation through to care.
The second is a continuum without threads — influences too many to list, aggregating combinatorially rather than descending in lines. Among the many: Richard Feynman; Carl Sagan, valued as much as a science-fiction writer of ideas as a scientist; Iain M. Banks as an ideas catalyst — writers and thinkers reached for as engines of imagination rather than as a scholarly canon (Andrew Maynard, 2026). The physics training matters as mindset rather than content: “The permission to ask questions, to wonder what if…, to be playful with ideas, to delight in being wrong, to imagine what could be and try and build theories around it” (Andrew Maynard, 2026). The published record says the same thing: “physics gave me something I have come to value more, not less, with time: a mindset that focuses on the core of research and scholarship — curiosity, wonder, experimentation, humility, serendipity, the willingness to push against what is settled, and to learn from mistakes and others — and that holds all of this to the test of scrutiny” (Everything you wanted to know about doing a PhD (mirror), 2026-06-14) — the same essay that carries his self-description as an “undisciplinarian”: “The work that matters tends to live in the seams.” And the continuum takes influence seriously from thinkers outside every established category — insight is weighed on its merits, not its credentials — a conviction long public, from the initiative’s welcome to “ordinary people with extraordinary ideas from every background” (futureofbeinghuman.asu.edu, captured 2026-08-05) back to Films from the Future (2018, p. 18).
Sean Leahy’s formation has a different shape: it runs through a canon. His teaching and practice are anchored in the named methods of futures and foresight scholarship, with a strong European center of gravity (strand 3), and two thinkers recur across his work: Marshall McLuhan, deployed in his on-air media analysis (Modem Futura eps. 19, 75), and John Dewey, whose natural impulses for learning are ground he returns to repeatedly (eps. 33, 46, 64, 71). The initiative draws on both formations — one gathered through canon and method, one through combinatorial aggregation — and the difference is itself productive.
The foundation also has foils — not specific thinkers, but a type: dogmatic, over-certain minds that wrap all their justification around a single idea. A standing suspicion of certainty runs through the work, and it is the ancestry of humility as method — in published form: AI risk sits in “an understanding-vacuum that is proving exceptionally easy for people to fill with their own ideas, ideology, or speculations” (Why everything you’ve ever heard about AI risk is wrong (mirror), 2023-11-26).
Risk science and responsible innovation
The initiative’s deepest disciplinary root is Andrew’s three-decade arc through risk science as practice: aerosol physics (PhD, Cambridge Cavendish Laboratory, 1992), exposure science at the UK Health and Safety Executive and NIOSH, nanotechnology risk policy at the Woodrow Wilson Center, and risk-science leadership at Michigan and ASU (Maynard CV, captured 2026-08-05). No formative risk-science mentor or theorist is named anywhere in his captured writing — the risk ancestry runs through practice, plus a small set of scholars named below.
Responsible innovation is a substantial scholarly field, and the work sits inside it — the papers’ own citation practice runs well beyond any short list of names. Among the field’s origin figures, two are engaged most directly: Jack Stilgoe and René von Schomberg. The Stilgoe, Owen and Macnaghten framework (Research Policy, 2013) recurs in Andrew’s writing across a decade — in 2016 he wrote that “their framework has the benefits of intellectual rigor along with real-world applicability,” and by 2026 he was compressing its four dimensions in his own words: “anticipate consequences before they arrive; include the people who will bear them; reflect critically on your own assumptions, values and framings; and respond — actually change course — when there are indications that something is wrong” (Orphan risks at the frontier of artificial intelligence (mirror), 2026-07-16). Stilgoe is also a collaborator: co-editor with Andrew of The Ethics of Nanotechnology, Geoengineering and Clean Technology (Routledge, 2017) and co-author of a 2017 Guardian piece on democratic AI debate. What the initiative adds is the operational complement — Andrew’s standing critique that the framework is “fiendishly hard to operationalize” (2023-05-05) names the gap that risk innovation and its tools set out to close. Von Schomberg’s connection is participation in the tradition he convenes: the Maynard & Garbee chapter on responsible innovation in entrepreneurial culture appears in the field’s International Handbook on Responsible Innovation (eds. von Schomberg & Hankins, 2019; posted 2019-08-13: canonical / mirror).
The mature statement of orphan risks (2026-07-16, above) names its scaffolding in full: Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky’s Risk and Culture (1982) — every society selects its risks, so an institution can be read from what it fears; Diane Vaughan’s The Challenger Launch Decision (1996), whose normalization-of-deviance mechanism Andrew transfers from hardware to written safety commitments; Theodore Porter and Michael Power on quantification and audit drift (shared with the next strand); Roger Kasperson and colleagues on the social amplification of risk (1988); and Atoosa Kasirzadeh’s decisive/accumulative distinction (2025) — evidence the strand still recruits new sources. The inheritance visibly deepened over time: the 2018 coinage post defined orphan risks against Donald Rumsfeld’s known/unknown taxonomy (canonical / mirror, 2018-12-13); the 2026 paper does the definitional work with Douglas and Wildavsky instead. Co-created elements stay credited: the tight-coupling/latency/value-mismatch mechanisms with Elizabeth Garbee (2019); “values drift” coined with Jeffrey Abbott (AI and the Art of Being Human, Abbott & Maynard, 2025, pp. 138–143).
Measurement critique and evaluation
The initiative’s refusal to let metrics define success (Metrics in their place, Trust over metrics) sits inside some seven decades of scholarship on what measurement pressure does to the measured — Ridgway (1956), Campbell’s law, Goodhart’s law in Marilyn Strathern’s phrasing, Power’s The Audit Society (1997), Porter’s Trust in Numbers (1995), Scott, Muller, and the research-assessment reform mainstream (Leiden Manifesto, The Metric Tide, DORA, CoARA). The stance, though, was lived before it was footnoted. It is stated in the principals’ own words across two decades — Andrew’s teaching philosophy “worries about what happens when metrics of learning take the place of actual learning” (andrewmaynard.net, captured 2026-08-05); the co-authored federal Future Travel Foresight Catalyst report (Maynard & Leahy, 2025) codifies “prioritizing trust over metrics” while citing no measurement-critique scholarship at all. Direct published contact with the canon came in July 2026, when the orphan-risks paper deployed Porter (institutions under scrutiny retreat to what can be quantified) and Power (the deliverable becomes the documentation) as named mechanisms (2026-07-16, above). The tradition is claimed as the body of work the stance sits in, and the claimed addition is the initiative’s live research question: how institutions judge, navigate, and thrive without metrics in charge.
Futures and foresight
This strand is load-bearing for the initiative’s method, and it has two asymmetric halves.
The deployed toolkit is joint and documented. Modem Futura’s multi-episode “futures toolbox” project teaches the field’s instruments to general audiences with their originators named on air: Joseph Voros’s Futures Cone — “one of the most foundational tools in futures studies” (ep. 74, 2026-03-10); Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons and Jerome Glenn’s Futures Wheel (ep. 78, 2026-04-07), their pairing offered as the hosts’ own methodological addition; and Sohail Inayatullah’s Futures Triangle, taught alongside the initiative’s own Intent Map from AI and the Art of Being Human (Abbott & Maynard, 2025) — the field’s instruments and the initiative’s inventions used as peers (ep. 72, 2026-02-24). Inayatullah is the strand’s most load-bearing named scholar: his Six Pillars (2008) anchors Sean’s foresight-studio syllabi, and “used futures” is working vocabulary for both hosts. Backcasting (Dreborg, 1996) and experiential futures (Candy & Dunagan, 2017) are cited in the co-authored USDOT report (Maynard & Leahy, 2025). And the show placed itself in the discipline’s lineage from launch: its first two episodes (October 2024) anchor in H.G. Wells’s “The Discovery of the Future,” the field’s usual founding text.
The formation is split. Sean is the methods-canon principal, grounded in the writers and institutions of European futures and foresight practice: membership of the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, whose toolkit and reports run through his courses and episodes; five years leading media communications at Webster University Leiden (2012–17); Future Days Copenhagen (ep. 92, 2026-07-14); and a 2018 Future Today Institute fellowship with Amy Webb (Leahy CV, captured 2026-08-05). Andrew, by contrast, deploys and teaches the field’s tools while claiming none of its canon as ancestry — no futurist appears as a personal influence anywhere in his captured writing; his futures grounding runs through imagination and narrative (Future Rising, 2020; strand 7). That is the combinatorial pattern in miniature. The strand also carries the foils’ worked example: of Superintelligence he wrote that its arguments “placed a far greater emphasis on philosophical speculation than practical reality” (Does the world need another Future of Humanity Institute? (mirror), 2024-04-28). What the initiative adds: the Foresight Catalyst model, the on-air toolbox itself, Futures Improv, and Sean’s futures-walking framework.
Play and unprogrammed learning
The inheritance here is deliberately light — a rich literature of play exists, and the work names almost none of it. The central credited borrow is the playpen/playground metaphor: it originates with Marina Umaschi Bers (Designing Digital Experiences for Positive Youth Development: From Playpen to Playground, Oxford, 2012) and is used extensively by Mitchel Resnick, whose Lifelong Kindergarten (MIT Press, 2017) Andrew calls “a revelation” — he wrote to Resnick before publishing, and Resnick pointed him onward (Are we putting our undergrads in playpens… (mirror), 2024-03-17). The claimed additions are the extensions: to undergraduate education, then to AI (AI playgrounds (mirror), 2025-03-15; Playgrounds, not playpens). John Dewey is present in Andrew’s self-description as part of “more than a century of research… going back to John Dewey and others” — a continuum invoked, not a lineage claimed — and worked with concretely once, in a 2025 assessment experiment built on Dewey’s inquiry arc with Punya Mishra as the named conduit (2025-08-24). Dewey as a formative influence belongs to Sean’s side of the map (strand 3).
Beyond that, the play research itself — designing spaces constrained to a degree yet open to serendipitous, self-directed flourishing — is early-days and deliberately thread-free: its influences are homogenized, an aggregation without clear threads, which Andrew identifies as part of how his mind works (Andrew Maynard, 2026). He points to the long tradition of unprogrammed play spaces — the Danish skrammellegeplads among them — as what the work playfully extends (Andrew Maynard, 2026), and the published thesis essay (Learning by not trying to learn, 2026-08-02) names no play scholars at all. That absence is the strand’s shape: the practiced root is Andrew’s own undergraduate physics labs, where constrained-yet-open play was how physicists were made (2024-03-17, postscript).
Mind, self, and technology
This is the strand where Andrew explicitly departs from his usual pattern: an emerging field where much of the work deliberately draws on others (Andrew Maynard, 2026), built the way academics expect foundations to be built — cited, seamed, and checkable.
The Cognitive Trojan Horse rests on a credited anchor: epistemic vigilance, from Dan Sperber and six colleagues (Mind and Language, 2010) — “a seminal paper,” in Andrew’s words, whose abstract he quotes verbatim (Is AI a Cognitive Trojan Horse? (mirror), 2026-01-10). Around it sits a named supporting cluster: Reber and Unkelbach on processing fluency (2010); Fiske, Cuddy and Glick on warmth and competence (2007); Dan Kahan and colleagues on motivated reasoning (2012, 2017); de Visser et al. on anthropomorphism and trust resilience (2016). The essay documents its own frontier — a Scopus sweep finding almost nothing at the AI-and-vigilance intersection — and the additions on top (the evolutionary-mismatch framing, honest non-signals co-originated with an AI and credited as such, the Intelligent User Trap) are marked as additions.
The constitutive-resonance work names its scaffolding in the published abstract (SSRN preprint, 2026-03-02): the term “constitutive resonance” is adopted, not coined — first introduced by Peter Sloterdijk and further developed by William Mazzarella — and the framework is situated within and against existing frames from Stiegler’s constitutive technics and Ricoeur’s narrative identity to Barad’s intra-action and Clark and Chalmers’ extended mind, while drawing on the physics of coupled oscillatory systems — the physics mindset made concrete in a philosophy-of-selfhood argument. Peter-Paul Verbeek’s technological mediation theory grounds the argument that capability cannot be separated from transformation (What we miss when we talk about “AI harnesses” (mirror), 2026-02-22). And AI and the Art of Being Human (Abbott & Maynard, 2025) takes Sherry Turkle’s “evocative objects” as a named point of departure and pushes beyond it: AI does not merely provoke self-reflection, it actively constructs versions of us (AI as mirror).
Scholarship and public scholarship
The named tradition here was found after the idea, and the work says so. Andrew coined “artisanal intellectual” in a footnote (2025-02-09), then mapped its prehistory in a disclosed AI-assisted essay (The artisanal intellectual in the age of AI (mirror), 2025-02-16 — produced with OpenAI’s Deep Research, edited line by line, references tracked to primary sources where possible). The ancestry it verified and adopted: C. Wright Mills, whose 1959 “On Intellectual Craftsmanship” described true scholarship as “a choice of how to live as well as a choice of career”; Dominic Boyer (the anthropologist — not Ernest Boyer), whose 2002 essay may be the phrase’s first formal use, defining an artisanal intellectual by an immediate, sensuous relationship to knowledge-making against “strongly capitalized… austere and market-mediated” relations; Michael Polanyi on tacit knowledge (1966); Richard Sennett on craftsmanship as enduring human impulse (2008); and Martin Heidegger’s enframing warning (1954), the one figure here documented as shared conversational ground with Sean (Modem Futura ep. 18, 2025-02-11). Of these, only Mills became a genuine recurring touchstone — the Letters from the Department of Intellectual Craft fiction (2025-11) is built around his essay by name (The artisanal intellectual).
The formation of the practice itself is elsewhere: in the physics craft-apprenticeship (“It also grounded me in the art and craft of research and scholarship — from the age of 13 I was immersed in learning the craft,” 2026-06-14, above) and in a two-decade public-scholarship position stated in Andrew’s own voice — knowledge mobilization as the point of scholarship, with the person as conduit rather than subject (andrewmaynard.net, captured 2026-08-05; Andrew Maynard, 2026; constitution art. 8). The practice artifacts run from trade books and preprints-with-landing-pages through soyouwantaphd.wtf — three decades of PhD mentorship rebuilt as an llms.txt-native, AI-legible guide (spring 2026, built with Claude; verified live 2026-08-07) — to this corpus itself (Writing for AI, Massively-augmented research).
Story, film, and imagination
This strand’s method — story as a serious instrument for thinking about technological futures — grew inside the risk and responsible-innovation scholarship: Films from the Future (2018) is a risk-and-society book chapter by chapter, using film to carry arguments about gene editing, AI, and the technologies reshaping being human. Its opening chapter states the method’s charter in popular register, beginning with 2001: A Space Odyssey watched at sixteen: “getting too wrapped up in the minutiae of how accurate a science fiction movie is misses the point—these are stories about our relationship with the future” (p. 15), and film as leveler — appreciable by anyone, credentialed or not (p. 18; Sci-fi film as method).
Among the strand’s many influences, the ideas-writers stand out. Iain M. Banks, ideas catalyst: a signed Look To Windward is “one of my prize possessions” (Dear Mr. Musk… (mirror), 2023-08-28), and the Culture novels supply a live counter-image to doom framings — machines that cherish what makes biological life unique (2023-07-19). Carl Sagan as science-fiction writer: Contact is “very much, a love letter to science” — one “both humble and generous” (Living by more than science alone (mirror), 2023-09-29), with a full Films from the Future chapter built on it. Douglas Adams supplies a register rather than a doctrine — wit as a mirror to absurdity, his radio scripts among Andrew’s prized possessions (Modem Futura ep. 90, 2026-06-30). The physics side contributes the demonstration tradition through Brian Pippard, whose rope-ladder demonstration Andrew attended in Cambridge and has kept alive ever since — a performed story doing what no equation could (Tipping points). And the inheritance stays open at street level: the “first date” theory of what a documentary should do came from producer Ted Tremper’s aside at a 2026 Copenhagen Q&A, credited twice in one post (Are you an AI apocaloptimist? (mirror), 2026-03-22). Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein anchors the strand’s oldest thread — fiction carrying a governance argument — and bridges to care (2025-03-09, strand 9).
The creative edge is this strand’s second half: the initiative’s published values — obsessive curiosity, radical creativity, grounded exuberance, and catalytic serendipity among them (Guiding Principles) — practiced as a hundred-track playlist tuning a room, a serendipity button in a newsletter (2025-04-20), Futures Improv on air, and conversations staged as idea-engines, with conceptual artist Jonathon Keats at the center of the In Conversation With series (2024). On Sean’s side, story is curricular: narrative and imagination taught as futures methods, with Afrofuturism and Chicanafuturism as named schools (FIS 307, Leahy syllabi, captured 2026-08-05). Ideas here arrive through fiction, demonstrations, rooms, and conversations rather than through a citation graph: that is the strand’s method.
Communication and trust
One classic text plus a documented gap: that is the scholarly inheritance of parasocial communication. The classic is Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl’s “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction” (Psychiatry, 1956), quoted at length as the founding statement of one-way but genuinely felt audience relationships; the gap is documented in the same essay’s own Scopus analysis, which found a single record at the expert–public-communication intersection (Why parasocial communication around complex ideas is important (mirror), 2025-05-25). The initiative’s move — parasocial relationship-building as deliberate method, codified in the 2025 federal Foresight Catalyst report — is claimed as an addition on top of a mostly empty intersection.
The strand’s standing foil is the deficit model, cited to Simis et al. (2016) and Scheufele (2022), with Brian Wynne’s mid-1990s sheep-farmers study named as evidence of how long scholars have understood the expert–lay divide (2023-09-04: canonical / mirror). The relational-versus-transactional distinction is grounded in the two-way engagement literature (NASEM’s Communicating Science Effectively, 2017 — Andrew served on NASEM’s Science of Science Communication committee, 2015–16) and in practitioner tacit knowledge; the finer distinction between relationship-based and relational communication is Andrew’s own, offered as evolving and possibly contested (2025-05-25). Trust-side ancestry is credited to TIGTech’s seven drivers of trust, endorsed from his advisory-panel seat (2020-12-15: canonical / mirror). The formative material is practitioner example rather than theory: Christian Drosten’s pandemic podcast, Sagan sidelined by academia for engaging publics, and the early YouTube science communicators — Hank Green, Derek Muller, Henry Reich — whose work, shown to him by his children, prompted Risk Bites in 2012 (2024-09-04: canonical / mirror). And Sean’s convergence arrives independently, from pedagogy, in his own words: “AI in the classroom only works when it sits on top of something fundamentally relational — the trust between instructor and student” (seanmleahy.com, 2026) — evidence that relational-over-transactional is a shared foundation, not one principal’s stance.
Care
The care strand follows the route its founding essay describes (The “hard” concept of care in technology innovation (mirror), 2025-03-09) — through colleagues and conversation, with the scholarly survey arriving through a disclosed AI research partner. Emma Frow is central: casual conversations with her “planted the seeds,” and her work on care in technology development — particularly synthetic biology, grounded in feminist theory and STS — is the strand’s named guide. In her own words, quoted in the essay, a care-based approach “helps draw attention to what is often invisible or undervalued work… it’s 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.” The second seed was psychologist Alison Gopnik, heard in late 2023 on care, caregiving, and AI. Around these, the essay’s own citations: Bruno Latour on technologies as monsters requiring stewardship — harking back, in Andrew’s words, to Frankenstein “as a cautionary tale of what happens when we don’t care for our creations” — and Joan Tronto’s “privileged irresponsibility,” with the provenance carried openly: the Tronto, Held, and wider care-ethics namings arrive through the credited Deep Research analysis Andrew commissioned, quoted, and pushed back on, not through a claimed reading of the canon. The essay also deliberately widened the frame beyond Western care ethics, to concepts of care from Confucianism and Buddhism to Daoism and indigenous knowledge systems.
AI and the Art of Being Human (Abbott & Maynard, 2025) carries the strand into practice: Maria Puig de la Bellacasa is cited for care as a way of knowing (p. 93), Robert Pirsig’s care-quality link enters in Jeffrey Abbott’s voice (pp. 107–108), and Frow is acknowledged as “so inspirational and foundational to this book” (p. 345). What the initiative adds is the hardening: care as a hard concept — rigorous and operationalizable, not sentiment — the CARE Loop and Care as one of four postures (Postures and tools), and care as a guiding frame for the podcast’s topics and tone (Modem Futura ep. 53, 2025-10-14). The care essay sits in Andrew’s own “Start Here” list (2025-11-24) — a strand that arrived late and moved straight to the center.
A living map
This is a first full accounting, not a finished one. Some strands are mature and densely documented; others — the play research above all — are early-days by design and will develop, or stay deliberately open, as the work does. Which strands feed which ideas is only partly drawn here: the ideas ring pages carry the local lineages, and the cross-links between them are the combinatorial architecture this foundation exists to support. Like everything in this corpus, the map is dated, revisable, and held with humility — it will grow as the work does.