Future of Being Human an Arizona State University initiative

Universities must lead

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

Who is institutionally equipped to help society navigate the arrival of increasingly capable AI? Andrew Maynard’s answer arrives by elimination, and it lands on an institution he declines to flatter. AI companies dominate the intellectual space around advanced frontier models but lack the breadth of vision the task demands; democratically elected governments hold the societal mandate but mostly lack the imagination and agility. What remains is the research university — by its own rhetoric a home of boundary-transcending scholarship, transformative learning, and public value, and in Maynard’s reading an institution “comfortably stuck in bystander mode” (2025-01-07). The idea is therefore a standing challenge rather than a celebration: universities are perhaps the only institutions that combine the mandate and the breadth to lead advanced AI transitions, and if they cannot or will not, “it’s probably time for these hallowed bastions of academia to ask what value they actually bring to the table.” Its constructive corollary, written as Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute closed in 2024, is that the world still needs audacious futures research — but grounded in the humility, social connectedness, and public accountability that public universities are unusually placed to provide. For an initiative founded inside a public university to explore what it means to be human in an age of transformative AI and other transformative technologies, this is close-to-home territory — Maynard has described adjacent institutional thinking as “highly relevant to my current work with the Arizona State University Future of Being Human initiative” (2024-08-11), and the connection is carried here at that strength: stated relevance, not a claimed charter.

The argument

It opens from a prediction taken seriously. If Sam Altman and others are right that AI agents are about to start materially changing work, Maynard wrote in January 2025, “we urgently need new understanding and thinking on how humanity will successfully navigate the coming advanced AI transition” — and where it will come from “is far from clear.” AI companies dominate the intellectual space around frontier models, his hedge intact: “responsible as these companies claim to be (and I think they’re trying hard), they still lack the breadth of vision and understanding that’s necessary to succeed here.” Governments — “democratically elected ones at least” — hold the mandate to steer AI toward beneficial futures, “but in most cases they lack the imagination, vision, or agility, to achieve what’s needed” (2025-01-07).

Universities are what remains, and the case for them is double-edged. Their own rhetoric promises new thinking, rigorous scholarship, transformative learning; they also “tend to be mired in tradition, convention, and self preservation.” Up to the challenge? “I’m not convinced they are. But I’m also struggling to identify other types of institutions and organizations that have the mandate and capability to rise to the challenge.” Leadership would not mean bolting “AI” onto existing disciplines — a mistake that reduces AI to a funding buzzword — but integrated, domain-agnostic work across three intersecting foci: where we live, what we do, who we are.

The field is not empty — he names standout initiatives at Stanford, Cambridge, and Oxford — but “these and other initiatives are barely scratching the surface of what is needed,” while “most institutions seem to be comfortably stuck in bystander mode as they play with the latest AI tools, or stick to disciplinary norms as they nibble at the edges of AI-based capabilities.” The essay prices stepping up in billions of dollars free of creativity-stifling strings, and in researchers able to work “without having to bow to conventional metrics of success” — and closes as a dare, not a plan.

The corollary came eight months earlier, as Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute closed in April 2024. Maynard wrote from confessed ambivalence. He had long been skeptical of FHI’s signature ideas: a 2008 dinner with founder Nick Bostrom — “pleasant enough” — saw them part company over whether limitless self-replicating nanoscale machines would defy the second law of thermodynamics, and Superintelligence read to him as placing “a far greater emphasis on philosophical speculation than practical reality.” Yet he credits the Institute as “effective in pushing the bounds of thinking in ways that transcended disciplines,” and holds that “there’s never been a greater need for far-sighted and transdisciplinary thinking around how to ensure human flourishing in the face of increasingly transformative technological advances.” Does the closure leave a vacuum? His answer: “a strong yes, but with some rather large caveats.” The caveats are the idea: new futures thinking must break with convention while “grounded in humility, social relevance and connectedness,” aware that “future-building is a collaborative effort — not something that should be left to an elite group of thinkers and innovators” (2024-04-28).

Public universities earn their place in that answer threefold: they sit at the nexus of multiple stakeholders and publics with, he argues, a level of accountability found nowhere else; they equip the next generation to be “effective and empowered builders of the future”; and they hold the potential — “admittedly nascent in many” — for rigorous boundary-crossing scholarship. The charge is to succeed where FHI did not: “Not by trying to recreate the Future of Humanity Institute, but by moving beyond it.”

Later events read as tests. When the US government’s Genesis Mission (November 2025) “places national labs—and not universities—in the driving seat” of AI-accelerated science (2025-12-07), his counsel is a harder look inward, not protectionist complaint: “it’s up to universities—and more explicitly their leadership and members—to find and articulate the value they potentially bring to the table, rather than assume it’s a given” — then, a line to itself, “Because, at present, I’m not sure it is.” Leadership also cuts inward: as universities hand students generative AI tools amid emerging mental-health concerns, “this, to my mind, comes with a social, moral and (I would assume) legal duty of care for the health and wellbeing of users” (2025-11-09).

The show-side, developed with Sean Leahy on Modem Futura and carried here from show notes, rounds the challenge into images: episode 33, with guest Punya Mishra, explores “how universities can act as society’s “flywheel” to slow runaway tech” (2025-05-27), and in episode 55 the hosts argue “universities must become transparent, experimental “living laboratories” that test and share both the successes and failures of emerging technologies” (2025-10-28). None of this is boosterism: the leadership on offer is conditional, argued from elimination, priced in self-reinvention.

Lineage

In his own words

From Universities need to step up their AGI game (AI-readable mirror), Andrew Maynard, 2025-01-07:

“This all sounds like a tall order for institutions that often take years to make the smallest of decisions. But if humanity is to successfully navigate the coming advanced AI transitions and thrive in an AI-dominated future, it’s time for universities to up their AGI game …

… unless, that is, someone can come up with a better approach that doesn’t rely on academic institutions. In which case, it’s probably time for these hallowed bastions of academia to ask what value they actually bring to the table as advanced AI is poised to transform every aspect of our lives.”

From Does the world need another Future of Humanity Institute? (AI-readable mirror), Andrew Maynard, 2024-04-28:

“To successfully navigate the complex landscape between where we are now and the futures we aspire to, we will collectively need new thinking, new ideas, new insights, new models, and new ways of doing things. These will need to break with past thinking and push against established boundaries. And they’ll need to be unshackled by convention — whether academic, intellectual, or practice-based.

At the same time new thinking and insights will need to be grounded in humility, social relevance and connectedness, and an awareness that future-building is a collaborative effort — not something that should be left to an elite group of thinkers and innovators.”

From the same essay, Andrew Maynard, 2024-04-28:

“Yet with a focus on serving the public good and a will to innovate and transcend convention — from researchers and scholars as well as the institutions they’re a part of — there are opportunities here to succeed where FHI did not. Not by trying to recreate the Future of Humanity Institute, but by moving beyond it to build the foundations of understanding that will help ensure human flourishing decades and centuries into the future.”

Engagement and reception

As of 2026-08-13, our reception record documents no published independent engagement with this thread’s specific claims — no reply to the bystander diagnosis, no citation of the post-FHI prescription — and that absence is recorded as absence; the initiative does not typically solicit reception (Philosophy). What the record does hold is adjacent: platforms within the higher-education-and-AI conversation seeking Maynard out. The Education Disrupted Substack devoted a podcast episode to him and the initiative (2025-10-13), and the Yidan Prize Foundation invited the opening keynote at its 2025 conference on the future of teaching and learning, then published his essay on education in the age of AI (April 2025) — both documented in Reception, and both engaging his wider higher-education thinking rather than this argument specifically; they are listed at that strength. Two calibrations follow. First, the thread itself runs on others’ records — Altman’s predictions, FHI’s closure alongside Anders Sandberg’s final report and Émile Torres’s reporting, a JAMA Network research letter, Bloomberg’s reporting, the Pew survey behind episode 55 — so the documented engagement flows outward from the essays; engagement flowing back has not yet surfaced in what we can check. Second, calls for university reinvention are a crowded genre to which many hands have contributed, and Maynard writes from inside a working example: the Genesis Mission essay notes that anyone familiar with Arizona State University “will recognize something of ASU’s redefining of the “New American University” here” (2025-12-07) — the argument works within that institutional current rather than claiming to originate the genre.

Where to go deeper

The essays

The episodes (all at modemfutura.com; see Modem Futura)

Related ideas-ring pages

Related corpus pages