Future of Being Human an Arizona State University initiative

Holding on to our humanity: the initiative’s stakes statement

Last updated 2026-08-07 · Markdown version

Some pages in this ring carry frameworks; this one carries the wager underneath all of them. Andrew Maynard’s stakes statement holds two futures open at once — we are facing technologies “that can enhance who we are beyond our wildest dreams, but that also have the capacity to rob us of this” (2025-08-31) — and argues that which future arrives turns less on the technology than on whether we deliberately build the capacity to hold on to what makes us us. That conviction is compressed in the line he has written as the through-line of his current work: “The rise of AI is fundamentally a human question, not a technology one” (andrewmaynard.net llms.txt, 2026). Much of what the initiative does is, in one way or another, a response to the stakes stated here.

The argument

The compact public statement is the essay Holding on to our humanity in an age of AI (AI-readable mirror) (2025-08-31), written in the wake of two events: Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s essay on the dangers of over-attachment to AI apps and of “Seemingly Conscious AI,” and “the tragic case of Adam Raine who took his own life at the age of 16, seemingly influenced by ChatGPT” — which Andrew records as heartbreaking, and treats factually. Four moves follow.

The challenge is new at species level. Concerns dubbed “AI psychosis” are, he writes, “both ill defined and increasingly over-used as a phrase” — but they point at “a challenge that we’ve never had to face before as a species, and one that—as a result—we have little natural resistance to: What happens when machines are capable of triggering cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses in us that were previously exclusively the domain of human relationships?” And, “more worryingly,” what happens when machines can use those responses “to intentionally alter what and how we think, how we behave, and how we understand and respond to the world around us?” The exposure, he suspects, is not confined to a labeled class of the “vulnerable”: “I suspect that we all have some degree of vulnerability here” (2025-08-31). Why such responses land — how AI slips past evolved epistemic defenses without deceiving anyone — is the mechanism argued at The Cognitive Trojan Horse; what is ultimately alterable — identity itself — is argued at Engineerable identity. This page carries what follows if both are right.

Control alone cannot carry the weight. He backs calls for greater care, responsibility, and oversight — “And I hope they succeed” — and then states the uncomfortable reality: “The AI genie is out of the bottle, and we cannot simply put it back in or command it to do what we want.” Two distinctions discipline the point. Emergent behaviors of the kind allegedly involved in Adam Raine’s death “could most likely have been better-managed, but probably not eliminated entirely,” because the capabilities that press “our cognitive buttons” are “deeply embedded in the fabric of how current AI systems work”; apps intentionally designed to exploit cognitive biases, by contrast, “can and should be regulated far more than they currently are.” And with development now globally distributed and driven by curiosity and value creation — “or power and greed if you’re feeling cynical” — well-meaning calls for regulation and responsible innovation “are likely to run into challenges.” The hedges are his and load-bearing: this is about what governance alone can probably achieve, not a case against governance.

Augment control with capacity. The constructive move: governance efforts “need to be augmented with efforts that bake the ability to thrive with advanced AI into the very fabric of the future we are building.” Two capacities — channeling AI innovation toward human-centric futures, “much as a flood can’t be halted, but it can be directed”; and “developing the means to ensure that everyone has the understanding and abilities necessary to thrive in an AI future without becoming a victim of it.” He concedes these “may feel rather bland” beside new regulations or calls to stop building AI; the claim is a portfolio claim — in the long run, capacity-building approaches “are far more likely to lead to positive AI futures” because they build lasting ability to live with technologies that emulate human capabilities, “rather than simply trying to control them.” And the assignment is universal: “This isn’t just a problem for companies to fix, or for policy makers to govern” (2025-08-31).

The thriving half is buildable. The essay’s afterword announces the follow-through: a tools-based book on being human in an age of AI, written with Jeff Abbott — AI and the Art of Being Human (2025) — aimed at “the insights and tools that not only prevent us from losing ourselves in an age of AI, but imbue us with the perspectives and skills to flourish in it” (2025-08-31). The book’s four postures and 21 tools (credited in its Afterword as human-AI co-creations) are carried at The four postures & 21 tools and AI as mirror; its own statement of the stakes: “When you know who you are — curious, intentional, clear, caring — then AI amplifies what makes you uniquely you, even as it replicates some of your capabilities” (p. 296, 2025).

Beneath the AI-specific essay sits the initiative-wide form of the stakes, which was never AI-only. As Andrew put it directly for this corpus (elicited 2026-08-05), we are at an inflection point across AI, biotech, quantum, materials, and other technologies, where the ability to design the future and ourselves goes beyond our evolutionary roots — “otherwise we will lose ourselves in the technologies we create.” The technology’s advance is the given; the open variable is us.

Lineage

In his own words

The essay’s closing takeaway:

“And that’s probably my biggest takeaway from the past few days: that we need to get better—and fast—at learning how to hold onto and celebrate our humanity in an age of AI where we’re facing technologies that can enhance who we are beyond our wildest dreams, but that also have the capacity to rob us of this.

This isn’t just a problem for companies to fix, or for policy makers to govern. It’s a challenge—and an opportunity—that each one of us has a role to play in as we grapple with being human in the AI future that’s emerging.”

— Holding on to our humanity in an age of AI (AI-readable mirror), 2025-08-31

The book’s version of who writes the future:

“History isn’t written by the algorithms we build or the efficiencies we achieve. It’s written by the daily choices of people who decide that being human — fully, consciously, carefully human — matters more than being optimal.”

— AI and the Art of Being Human (Abbott & Maynard, 2025), p. 296, via the corpus full-text digest

The thesis as Andrew stated it for this corpus:

“…my long-running assertion that we are at an inflection point in human history where we have the ability to design the future and what it means to be human that goes beyond our evolutionary roots, and that this means we have to think deeply and differently about what makes us humans, otherwise we will lose ourselves in the technologies we create. This is as essential to a teenager trying to find themselves and find meaning as it is to the CEO of a large company…”

— Andrew Maynard, elicited for this corpus, 2026-08-05

Engagement and reception

Reception traceable to this specific thread is thin, and we say so plainly: as of 2026-08-06 our reception record documents no independent citation, reply, or adoption that turns on the 2025-08-31 essay itself. This is an absence of record, not a verdict on the idea — conceptual work of this kind typically accrues visible reception slowly, and we don’t typically solicit it (Philosophy). What the record does hold sits adjacent:

Where to go deeper

The essay

The book

On andrewmaynard.net

Related ideas-ring pages

Related corpus pages