Future of Being Human an Arizona State University initiative

Technology as oxygen

Last updated 2026-08-13 · build 20260814T0314Z-83bb462d · Markdown version · corpus index

Ask Andrew Maynard whether he is a techno-optimist or a techno-pessimist and the answer is that the question itself has failed: it is, as he put it in March 2024, “a bit like asking if I’m an oxygen pessimist or optimist” — “neither” being the only answer, because oxygen is not something a person is for or against; it is part of what a person is. Technology as oxygen is the idea beneath that refusal: technology is not something we do but something we are — constitutive of the species — and approaches to global challenges that treat it as an optional add-on are quietly built on a false premise. The claim lives in an essay Andrew twice flags as “very much a work in progress” (2024-03-31), and it pairs with a stance he published years before the initiative existed, in the closing chapter of Films from the Future (2018): renouncing technology from a position of privilege risks denying people without the same privileges the chance to make their own decisions. The two halves refuse the same binary from opposite ends — one declines the cheerleader’s seat, the other the renouncer’s. The underlying intuition is not claimed as new: the essay itself points to science and technology studies, history, philosophy, and “many more” fields that work on the human–technology relationship, and Andrew’s later theory writing engages that lineage by name (Constitutive resonance). What the oxygen framing adds is compression for public argument — and for an initiative whose founding question is what it means to be human in an age of transformative AI and other transformative technologies, it sits close to first principles: the question presumes the relationship.

The argument

The 2024 essay opens mid-exasperation — “I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been asked if I’m a techno-pessimist or a techno-optimist” — with a question that “makes little sense to me” (2024-03-31). The oxygen analogy is the counter: oxygen is “integral to who I am, and not an add-on that I can take or leave” — so “neither” is the only answer on offer. Andrew undercuts his own device at once — “The oxygen analogy is a clunky one” — and keeps it for what it captures: technology “is so deeply integrated into who we are as individuals and as a species that to treat it as something other than this is misleading — and potentially dangerous.”

From that integration claim the essay derives a compound failure mode — three assumptions, quoted in full below, that end with “we are setting ourselves up for failure in the technologically advanced futures we’re striving to create.” The claim is hedged as his own — “I would argue that our collective identity and trajectory as a species can only be truly understood through the complex relationships between people, technology, and the future” — and he is explicit that existing fields — science and technology studies, history, philosophy, science policy, technology governance, “these areas and many more” — study parts of it. Having worked across many of them, he is “not convinced” they hold “the breadth of vision and the integration of understanding” coming transitions demand (Advanced technology transitions).

The title’s technology problem is the payoff. The challenges that absorb collective attention — climate change, misinformation, loneliness, geopolitics, and democratic decision-making among his examples — mostly do not present as technology issues. Yet “none of these challenges make sense outside the context of thousands of years of an evolving relationship between humanity and technology” — and “it’s rare that global problems are approached through the lens of this relationship.” This, to him, “presents a behemoth of a technology problem.” Framing global challenges without centering that relationship, he argues, “severely limits the development of effective pathways forward.” Navigate well and “we open up near-unimaginable possibilities”; badly, and “we risk catastrophic failures” (Catastrophic, not existential).

The essay then turns on its author. Much of Andrew’s professional life has involved supporting people who see technology as apart from who we are, “without overtly challenging their non tech-centric worldview.” He names the habit: “It’s a form of technology apologetics that’s been part of my professional life for decades — and one that intentionally seeks to support others where they are at in their thinking.” He reports he is “beginning to question its wisdom” — a record of doubt, not renunciation, in an essay written as “part of my process of trying to marshal my thoughts.”

The refusal’s other half is older. Closing Films from the Future from the Scottish island of Arran in 2018, he lets nostalgia in, then disowns it: “these dreams of a slower, more pleasant past are a sentimental illusion.” Emerging technologies, “when developed and used responsibly, can and do improve lives in quite powerful ways” — the conditional is his — and too many people live disadvantaged lives for lack of them. Hence the worry, quoted in full below: renouncing technologies from privilege risks denying others their own decisions. He goes “so far as to say” there is an obligation to explore new ways of using science and technology to improve lives — one that “comes with some tremendous responsibilities” — including learning to live responsibly in a world our own inventiveness keeps changing. Together the two pieces bracket the binary: renunciation is a privileged exit from a relationship there is no exiting; optimism and pessimism are spectator stances, and there are no spectators.

What follows is offered with candor about its incompleteness: “The honest answer is that we don’t yet know.” The starting point proposed: “put technology at the core of everything we’re doing to ensure a future of human flourishing on a healthy planet — not as a solution to be implemented, nor as a problem to be addressed,” but as “part of the very DNA of being human in a future that’s increasingly of our own making” — plus knowledge-building that transcends conventional disciplines, and “pilots” (adopting a colleague’s term “pilot”) to steer the transitions ahead. The afterword adds a transdisciplinary teaching cross-cut on the species’ long, entangled history with its technologies. He says plainly he has no compelling call to action; the essay ends on the choice the analogy sharpens — keep acting as if technology, like oxygen, is something to be for or against, or learn to work with “the drive to innovate that is part of the very essence of who we are” (2024-03-31).

Lineage

In his own words

From We have a technology problem – and it probably isn’t what you think (AI-readable mirror), Andrew Maynard, 2024-03-31:

“I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been asked if I’m a techno-pessimist or a techno-optimist. It’s a frustrating question as it makes little sense to me. It’s a bit like asking if I’m an oxygen pessimist or optimist — “neither” is the answer of course as oxygen is integral to who I am, and not an add-on that I can take or leave.

The oxygen analogy is a clunky one. But it does capture the idea that technology is so deeply integrated into who we are as individuals and as a species that to treat it as something other than this is misleading — and potentially dangerous.”

From the same essay, 2024-03-31:

“By assuming that technology is something we do and not something we are; by compartmentalizing our approaches to the relationship between people, technology, and the future; and by assuming that everything will turn out OK because it’s always done so in the past; we are setting ourselves up for failure in the technologically advanced futures we’re striving to create.”

From the closing chapter of Films from the Future, published as Films from the Future: The Last Chapter (AI-readable mirror), Andrew Maynard, 2018-11-08:

“There are far too many people in today’s world who are living disadvantaged lives because they don’t have access to technologies that could make them better, and I worry that, if we’re tempted to start renouncing technologies from a position of privilege, we risk denying too many people without the same privileges the chance to make their own decisions. I would go so far as to say that 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.”

Engagement and reception

As of 2026-08-13, our reception record documents no independent published engagement with the 2024 essay or with the oxygen framing as such — no citation, commentary, or rebuttal — and that is recorded here as absence, nothing more. What the record does show is the author’s own continued reliance on the framing, which is not independent uptake and is not counted as such: the constitutive claim anchors the framing-error premise of the advanced technology transitions program (Advanced technology transitions), and as of 2025-11-24 Andrew lists the essay among the “Ten starter posts to orient you” on the Substack’s orientation page. One first-person data point sits in the essay itself, and it is only that: his report that he has “lost count” of how often the optimist-or-pessimist question is put to him is the author’s testimony about the binary’s persistence, not a measured finding about the idea’s reach. The 2018 stance sits inside a book whose reception Andrew himself later judged bluntly: “By most standards the book was a failure.” (2023-10-08) — a record kept on Sci-fi film as method and Books.

Where to go deeper

The essays

The book

Related ideas-ring pages

Related corpus pages