Future of Being Human an Arizona State University initiative

Prosponsibility: a prospective responsibility to the future

Last updated 2026-08-07 · Markdown version

Prosponsibility is Andrew Maynard’s term for a prospective responsibility to the future: an obligation held collectively and individually toward futures, and generations, that are not here yet — discharged through stewardship and future-making rather than harm-avoidance alone. The term is his; the concept is rooted in his book Future Rising (2020), which argues it at length without ever using the word, and its public definition sits in the Key Concepts of andrewmaynard.net/llms.txt (updated 2026-08-04). It matters because it turns the usual grammar of responsibility around: instead of asking who answers for harms already done, it asks what we owe the futures our tools are opening and closing — the ethical premise beneath the initiative’s work on navigating transformative AI and other transformative technologies.

The argument

Responsibility, as institutions typically practice it, faces backward: accountability for harms already done, plus harm-avoidance in advance. Prosponsibility — the word compresses “prospective responsibility” — names responsibility that faces the other way. Andrew’s public definition describes “the growing need to understand the future as something we are collectively and individually in relationship with, and to which we consequently bear a prospective responsibility” (llms.txt, 2026-08-04). Two commitments sit inside that sentence: the future is something we are in relationship with, not merely a time that happens to us; and the obligation runs forward — to that future and to the generations who will inherit it.

The concept is rooted in Future Rising (2020), which supplies its two grounding moves. The first makes the future something you can owe things to. The book’s scaffold is the future treated as an object — a prompt Andrew credits to a colleague rather than to himself, one that “opened the way to not only thinking about our rather unique relationship with the future in new ways, but to helping guide our thinking on our responsibility toward the future we’re building together” (2020-10-22). The book’s source image is Earthrise: the future as “an ‘object,’ something real and precious,” a “vibrant home we would gladly bequeath to generations to come” (p. 27). Andrew’s own emblem is a soap bubble, iridescent yet fragile — “full of wonder and promise, but at the same time, in need of care if it’s to survive and thrive” (2020-10-22). An object can be held in relationship, cared for, handed on.

The second move locates the duty-holders. Humans are “profoundly talented architects of our own future” (pp. 17–18), and the people at the cutting edges of science and technology are “future-makers”: their tools “could irreversibly alter the future for billions of people,” opening the way to some futures and closing it to others (p. 207). The chapter, opening with He Jiankui’s gene-edited twins, poses the question the concept answers: “what does it mean to be ‘responsible’ when you have the power to change the future?” (p. 206). On this framing, responsibility is directional before it is procedural: what matters morally is which futures your work opens, which it closes, and for whom. The dark side is equally blunt — “these selfsame abilities enable us to rob others of the futures they aspire to” — and the standing task is closing the gap between our ability to change the future and our capacity to do it well, “ensuring that what comes next is better than the past” (2020-12-10).

What discharges the obligation is stewardship and future-making, not abstention. Future Rising treats stewardship as a fact about our situation, not a virtue to adopt — “we are, by design, stewards of the future,” able “to take joy from building a future that values, nurtures, and celebrates others” (p. 210) — and the Afterword makes it a craft obligation: having been given the gift of being architects of our own future, “we have a responsibility to ourselves, and to future generations, to learn our trade and to build the best possible future we can imagine” (p. 216). The affirmative shape matters. Films from the Future (2018) had already argued that renouncing technology from a position of privilege denies the less privileged their own choices: “we have an obligation to explore new ways of using science and technology to improve the world we’re living in and the lives people lead” (p. 288). Harm-avoidance can be satisfied by doing nothing; prosponsibility cannot.

The register the concept travels in is part of its content. Hope is a deliberate stance, not a temperament: the close of Films from the Future refuses both nostalgia and inevitable dystopia, borrowing Douglas Adams — “‘Don’t Panic’ is as good a piece of advice as any” (p. 290). Feeling is design input: “what we feel about the future is just as important in determining how we design and create it as what we think about it” (Future Rising, p. 80). And the “we” that holds the responsibility must be large: “we should be striving for this ‘we’ to be as big and inclusive as possible” (p. 192) — an emphasis that echoes in the definition’s “collectively and individually.”

The concept is carried with its hedges intact. Re-reading the book four years on, Andrew wrote: “I must confess that, while I suggested that “humans are, in a very real sense, architects of the future” back in 2020, I’m still not entirely sure how useful this metaphor is” (2024-12-08) — fitting, for a responsibility exercised under uncertainty about the thing it is owed to. Per the llms.txt entry, the concept is explored further in Andrew’s broader work on advanced technology transitions and the future of being human; its stakes sharpen where future-makers’ tools reach identity itself (Engineerable identity).

Lineage

In his own words

From Future Rising, “Responsibility,” p. 207 (Mango Publishing, 2020; andrewmaynard.net/futurerising):

“The people working at these cutting edges of science and technology are, in a very real sense, future-makers. They are developing tools that could irreversibly alter the future for billions of people. And in the process, they are opening the way to some futures and closing it to others.”

From Future Rising, “Stewardship,” p. 210 (Mango Publishing, 2020):

“we’ve been given the gift of being able, not only to imagine and design the future, but to take joy from building a future that values, nurtures, and celebrates others. We have a profound ability to give to others around us, and even to generations to come. And as a result, we are, by design, stewards of the future.”

From the Key Concepts entry in andrewmaynard.net/llms.txt (authored by Andrew in the third person; updated 2026-08-04):

“Andrew uses the concept of “prosponsibility” to describe the growing need to understand the future as something we are collectively and individually in relationship with, and to which we consequently bear a prospective responsibility. The roots of the concept trace back to his book Future Rising, and it is further explored in his broader work on advanced technology transitions and the future of being human.”

Engagement and reception

The word itself has, as of 2026-08-06, no independent public record that we know of: no located citation, adoption, or third-party use, with its documented appearance being Andrew’s own llms.txt (updated 2026-08-04). We say that plainly rather than pad — and note that it 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).

The book the concept is rooted in has dated, checkable third-party engagement:

Where to go deeper

The book and the definition

Essays

Related ideas-ring pages

Related corpus pages