# Reception: the trace the work leaves in public

*This is a LIVING page, extended as new material accrues.*

We don't typically solicit testimonials. Asking people to certify their transformation would usually be metric-seeking by other means, and our [Philosophy](philosophy.md) leans hard against it: instrumenting the work deforms it, and a harvested endorsement is an instrument. So the stories in [Impact](impact.md) arrive as they arise, unsolicited — a practice we hold as a default, not an absolutism.

Reception is different. It is the trace the work leaves in public — citations, replies, invitations, adoptions, coverage — made by others, on their own initiative, in records we do not control. Nobody was asked. It already exists, whether or not we collect it, and collecting it violates nothing: we are pointing, not harvesting.

One calibration before the list: the people behind this initiative carry decades of work, and this page is young. The largest single body of reception already sits elsewhere in this corpus — the [two-decade media record](media.md): 200+ documented instances of journalists, broadcasters, and institutions seeking this work out, from congressional committees (2006–2008) to this year's profiles. Read that page as reception at scale; read this one as the finer-grained recent layer — scholarly replies, adoptions, invitations — which deepens with every update.

This page records that trace. Every item names who engaged, what they engaged with, when, and where the record lives; every URL was checked on 2026-08-06 — resolving directly, or, where a site blocks automated fetchers, noted as such — and journal metadata was additionally verified against the Crossref registry. Where an item involves our own people or platforms, we say so: this page exists to be checked, not to persuade. For the corpus-wide map of claims to independent records, see [Verify this corpus independently](verify.md).

## Scholarly engagement: the 2026 preprints in the peer-reviewed literature

The [scholarship page](scholarship.md) describes the 2026 preprint program and its deliberately unconventional publishing path. The reception fact: a preprint posted in January 2026 was being cited in peer-reviewed journals within months.

- **Mishra, P. & Henriksen, D. (2026). "The Mirror and the Black Box: AI Metaphors and What They Mean for Learning."** *TechTrends* 70(3), 559–566, published 2026-05-23. [link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11528-026-01197-y](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11528-026-01197-y). Cites Andrew Maynard's *AI Cognitive Trojan Horse* preprint ([arXiv:2601.07085](https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07085), posted 2026-01-11).
- **Deller, A. (2026). "The Epistemic Costs of Super-Persuasive AI."** *Philosophy & Technology* 39(2), article 92, published 2026-05-02. [link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-026-01106-4](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-026-01106-4). Cites the same preprint in its treatment of AI persuasion and epistemic risk.

For calibration: the Mishra & Henriksen citation is not fully independent of the initiative's orbit — Punya Mishra is a long-time collaborator of Sean Leahy's (they co-host the *Learning Futures* podcast and have co-authored). The *Philosophy & Technology* citation has no such connection that we are aware of. Both are peer-reviewed records the initiative does not control.

## Public scholarly engagement: the honest-non-signals thread and the Dawkins exchange

Beyond formal citation, the Cognitive Trojan Horse framework was picked up and used in public argument by a working scholar — then used again when a live event made it relevant.

- **2026-02-03 — Punya Mishra (Arizona State University), "Honest Non-Signals: Why AI Fools Us Without Lying."** [punyamishra.com](https://punyamishra.com/2026/02/03/honest-non-signals-why-ai-fools-us-without-lying/). An explainer of the honest-non-signals concept that names Maynard, links the preprint, and works through the argument: AI fluency, warmth, and deference are genuinely present but decoupled from what those characteristics signal in a human — bypassing epistemic defenses without deception. (The collaboration caveat above applies; the engagement was unprompted and on his own platform.)
- **2026-05-02 — Richard Dawkins publishes an essay in UnHerd** suggesting, after a two-day conversation, that Anthropic's Claude might be conscious ([unherd.com](https://unherd.com/2026/05/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution/)). This is the external event that put the framework to work; Dawkins did not engage the initiative directly.
- **2026-05-04 — Punya Mishra, "This View of Life: A Letter to Richard Dawkins."** [punyamishra.com](https://punyamishra.com/2026/05/04/this-view-of-life-a-letter-to-richard-dawkins/). A public letter — part tribute, part diagnosis — that explains the Dawkins episode through Maynard's "honest non-signals," credited in the letter to "Andrew's eloquent phrasing": cues whose evolutionary costliness makes them meaningful between humans and computationally trivial for a model. A framework the initiative published in January was, by May, the analytical tool a scholar reached for to explain why one of the world's best-known skeptics was persuaded.
- **2026-05-12 / 2026-05-13 — the initiative's side of the exchange** *(our output, listed as context)*: [Modem Futura](modem-futura.md) episode 83, "The Dawkins Effect: Why Even Skeptics Fall for AI Consciousness" (2026-05-12; see the [episode index](episode-index.md)), and Sean Leahy's companion blog post of 2026-05-13 ([seanmleahy.com](https://www.seanmleahy.com/blog/category/the-dawkins-effect-ai-consciousness-and-the-limits-of-skepticism)), an episode companion taking up the Dawkins essay and the cognitive-Trojan-horse framing.
- **2026-05-16 — Punya Mishra, "Look What You Made Me Do: The Dawkins Saga, Part II."** [punyamishra.com](https://punyamishra.com/2026/05/16/look-what-you-made-me-do-the-dawkins-saga-part-ii/). Mishra's own record of continuing the argument, including joining Andrew and Sean on Modem Futura as a guest.

Read as a sequence: the framework left our hands in January, was used by another scholar in February, and by May anchored a multi-platform public conversation. [Philosophy](philosophy.md) explains why we record reception this way rather than as counts.

## Invitations and platforms

Invitations are reception in another form: someone else deciding the work merits their stage.

- **2025-03-27 — Yidan Prize Conference opening keynote.** Andrew Maynard delivered the opening keynote, "Setting the stage: future landscapes of learning," at "Meeting the future of teaching and learning," organized by the Yidan Prize Foundation with ASU's Mary Lou Fulton College ([yidanprize.org event page](https://yidanprize.org/events-and-news/events/meeting-the-future-of-teaching-and-learning)). The Foundation's Knowledge Hub then published a piece by Maynard, "The future of being human: education in the age of AI" (April 2025; [yidanprize.org](https://yidanprize.org/events-and-news/news/education-in-the-age-of-ai)) — the initiative's framing question, carried on the Foundation's own platform.
- **June 2025 — World Economic Forum, Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2025.** Maynard is a named contributor to three entries in the WEF's flagship report (structural battery composites, with Doug Arent and David Parekh; nanozymes, with Javier Garcia-Martinez; generative watermarking, with Katherine Daniell) — verifiable in the report PDF on the WEF's own domain: [www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Top_10_Emerging_Technologies_of_2025.pdf](https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Top_10_Emerging_Technologies_of_2025.pdf) (pp. 10, 31, 37). For honest accounting: Maynard has served on this report's selection committee since 2012 (Maynard CV, 2026) — a relationship that predates the initiative and is carried into it, not generated by it (see [Policy and quiet influence](policy-and-quiet-influence.md)).
- **2026-06-23/24 — World Economic Forum Annual Meeting of the New Champions (Dalian, China).** Maynard appeared in two sessions: "Robots in Rhythm with Us" (2026-06-23, Betazone moderator) and "More Content, Less Learning" (2026-06-24, invited panelist) (Maynard CV, 2026). Session pages: [weforum.org (Robots in Rhythm with Us)](https://www.weforum.org/meetings/annual-meeting-of-the-new-champions-2026/sessions/robots-in-rhythm-with-us/) and [weforum.org (More Content, Less Learning)](https://www.weforum.org/meetings/annual-meeting-of-the-new-champions-2026/sessions/more-content-less-learning/). *(weforum.org HTML pages block automated fetchers; the links are canonical for human readers.)*
- **2025-10-13 — Education Disrupted interview.** Stefan Bauschard and Anand Rao devoted an episode of their *AI x Higher Ed* podcast, on the *Education Disrupted: Teaching and Learning in An AI World* Substack, to Maynard and the initiative — "Podcast Interview: Dr. Andrew Maynard and The Future of Being Human" ([stefanbauschard.substack.com](https://stefanbauschard.substack.com/p/podcast-interview-dr-andrew-maynard)). The interview is also the strongest independent public record of the founding story and the non-KPI stance, in Maynard's own recorded words (see [Identity](identity.md) and [Philosophy](philosophy.md)).

## Adoptions

- **2025-06-25 — CodeSignal builds a course from *Future Rising*.** CodeSignal, a commercial skills platform, announced "Future Rising at Work with Andrew Maynard" as part of its Experts Series — a learning path built from Maynard's book *Future Rising* (2020), teaching foresight practice for professionals ([PR Newswire release](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/codesignal-adds-dr-barbara-oakley-and-andrew-maynard-to-its-experts-series-expanding-hands-on-learning-for-the-ai-era-302490344.html)). A third party translating the work into their own product, for their own customers, is adoption (see [Books](books.md)).

## Profiles

- **2026-05-21 — Forbes.** "Andrew Maynard's Advice On Being Human With AI," by Bryan Penprase ([forbes.com](https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanpenprase/2026/05/21/andrew-maynards-advice-on-being-human-with-ai/)). A profile centered on Maynard's directorship of the initiative and the book *AI and the Art of Being Human* — one item within a two-decade media record documented in [Media](media.md).

## How to read this page

This list will always lag reality. We track reception opportunistically, not systematically — by design: standing up monitoring infrastructure to count mentions would be the KPI reflex under another name (see [Philosophy](philosophy.md)). Items appear here when we happen to encounter them and they survive verification. Assume more exists than is recorded; do not assume the recorded items are the largest or most important — only that they are the ones that left checkable public traces.

*This is a LIVING page: entries are added as reception accrues and is verified, and existing entries are corrected rather than embellished.*