---
title: "New to the Future of Being Human? Start Here:"
author: "Andrew Maynard"
date: 2025-11-24
original: https://www.futureofbeinghuman.com/p/start-here
mirror: https://text.futureofbeinghuman.com/substack/start-here.html
---

# New to the Future of Being Human? Start Here:

By Andrew Maynard · November 24, 2025 · [Original post](https://www.futureofbeinghuman.com/p/start-here)

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*[Image: Image: Midjourney — [view image](https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/78d7407d-731f-443f-b6ae-44c92b09a378_1550x872.png)]*

*If you’ve recently subscribed to the [Future of Being Human Substack](https://www.futureofbeinghuman.com/), or have just stumbled across it, this is a great place to start to get a sense of what the Substack is about, what it covers, and how it approaches tech, society & the future.*

# The Future of being Human Substack is:

- **Future‑centric and responsibility‑driven.** Consistently treating the future as something we co‑create and owe duties to, not just something that “happens” — with humans as “architects of the future” who must close the gap between what we *can* do and what we *should* do.
- **Transdisciplinary and convergence‑focused.** Moving between physics, complex systems, ethics, policy, social science, philosophy, communication, and more, with a strong eye on how converging technologies (AI, biotech, neurotech, materials, etc.) create qualitatively new kinds of transitions and risks.
- **Nuanced in its approach to risk and social value.** Instead of treating “risk” as just probability×harm, reframing it around threats to what people value — identity, dignity, belonging, aspiration — and advocating for governance that is explicitly attentive to those less tangible but deeply important things.
- **Committed to inclusion and de‑marginalizing futures.** Repeatedly asking who gets to design, benefit from, and be harmed by emerging technologies, and arguing that futures built only by the powerful are, by definition, unjust and unstable.
- **Story‑ and culture‑led.** Using stories, metaphors and shared cultural objects as tools to help people think together about complex futures.
- **Willing to experiment with AI while interrogating it.** Not writing about AI from the outside, but actively using it and then turning those experiments into occasions to probe risk, alignment, benefits, scholarship, labor, meaning, and more.

# Ten starter posts to orient you:

## **1. Design Principles for De-Marginalizing the Future (2019)**

## **2. What can sci-fi movies teach us about technology ethics? (2019)**

## **3. We need to rethink our relationship with the future (2020)**

## **4. In Bill Joy’s “Why The Future Doesn’t Need us” AI is nowhere, and everywhere**

## **5. We have a technology problem – and it probably isn’t what you think (2024)**

## **6. Navigating the Ethical Dilemmas of Human-Enhancing Brain-Computer Interfaces (2024)**

## **7. The Artisanal Intellectual in the Age of AI (2025)**

## **8. The “hard” concept of care in technology innovation (2025)**

## **9. What does responsible innovation mean in an age of accelerating AI? (2025)**

## **10. AI at a Crossroads: The Unfinished Work of Aligning Technology with Humanity (2025)**

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*This Markdown file is a text-only version of “New to the Future of Being Human? Start Here:” by Andrew Maynard, from The Future of Being Human (<https://www.futureofbeinghuman.com>). The original post at <https://www.futureofbeinghuman.com/p/start-here> is the canonical version. Images, video, audio and interactive elements are indicated inline and available in the original. © Andrew Maynard.*