Digital Culture Speaker Series: Future Rising — A Journey From the Past to the Edge of Tomorrow
Bio: Andrew Maynard is a scientist, author and a widely recognized thinker and commentator on socially responsible and ethical innovation. As director of the ASU Risk Innovation Lab, he is pushing the boundaries of how to think about risk and learn to succeed as we develop increasingly complex technologies.
Andrew’s work spans both emerging and converging technologies, from nanotechnology and gene editing to autonomous vehicles, neurotechnologies and artificial intelligence. A professor in the ASU School for the Future of Innovation in Society, he brings a transdisciplinary approach to problem-solving that combines the natural and social sciences with the arts and humanities, to explore new ways of collectively building a better future.
Andrew’s previous book, Films from the Future, explores socially responsible and ethical approaches to innovation through the lens of twelve science fiction movies. His upcoming book, Future Rising, takes readers on a unique journey through humanity’s relationship with the future and our responsibility to it.
When not trying to impress people with his academic prowess, Andrew describes himself as a “world-renowned towel-wrangler, t-shirt wearer and emerging technologies anti-discombobulator”
Abstract: If you were to imagine the future as an object, what would it look like? On one level, it’s an absurd question — the future is this intangible, unknowable “thing” that has yet to take on any particular form. And yet, on another level, the question is an intriguing entry into thinking differently about our collective relationship with the future and our responsibility to it. It’s also a question that got so stuck in Andrew Maynard’s mind after being asked it one day, that the only way he could excise it was to write a book about it. So he did.
The result was "Future Rising – A journey from the past to the edge of tomorrow" — a forthcoming book (to be released June 16) that takes readers on a journey from the big bang to what it means to be a good steward of the future, and that touches on everything from entropy, life, intelligence, loss, despair and hope, along the way. Andrew will be discussing his own journey from absurd ideas to creating a unique and (hopefully) compelling narrative about how we learn to be responsible architects of the future in a technologically advanced age while previewing the book and the ideas it explores.