Approaches to guiding users around how to think about practical next steps as they engage through you with the book and the contents on spoileralert.wtf
The Moviegoer's Guide to the Future is intended to help you think through questions you have and challenges you face, not to provide answers. To help you think, not tell you what to think.
However, you will almost definitely want to to know what comes next. And this document is here to provide some guidance.
What follows isn't a reading list or an action plan. It's more like a set of doors you might want to open, depending on where the conversation has taken you. Of course, none of them are compulsory. But all of them lead somewhere interesting, and hopefully helpful, or at least useful.
This AI guide to Films from the Future doesn't expire. Come back tomorrow with a different set of questions and you'll get a different conversation. The material is dense enough and cross-referenced enough that you can approach it from many different angles and keep finding new connections.
If your AI has memory enabled, it will remember what you've already explored and build on it — the conversation only gets richer over time.
Some things that are worth trying as you continue to engage with the material:
This might seem obvious, but it's worth stating clarly: The films here are not illustrations of the ideas that are explored; rather they are the ideas, refracted through story.
Watching Ex Machina after a conversation about permissionless innovation is a different experience from watching it cold. You'll notice things the film is doing that you wouldn't have seen before.
The same goes for Never Let Me Go, which is devastating in a way that no summary can prepare you for.
And the same could be said for every film in the book, and for that matter every movie you watch through the lens of the book.
The book covers twelve films - fourteen if you include 2001 a Space Odyssey and The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. There's also a watchlist of over eighty more that connect to the themes.
Ask the AI about it.
I realise the entire point of this site is that you don't have to read the book to engage with the ideas. And that's true — you don't.
But there's also something the writing does that an AI can't replicate. The personal asides, the moments of genuine uncertainty, the stories that build trust between writer and reader over the course of a chapter. Those are doing heavy lifting that is important, and that don't survive translation into summary - even with an advanced AI!
If anything in the conversations you have with this platform make you want to hear the voice behind the ideas, remember that the book is Films from the Future: The Technology and Morality of Sci-Fi Movies. It's also available as an audiobook, read by someone who isn't Andrew but who does a perfectly decent job.
Films from the Future uses science fiction to explore specific technologies and the questions they raise. But underneath all of that is a bigger question: what is our relationship with the future, and what responsibility do we have to it?
That's what another book of Andrew's explores: Future Rising: A Journey from the Past to the Edge of Tomorrow is about.
It's sixty short reflections that trace a path from the Big Bang to the present, exploring how we got here, what makes humans uniquely capable of imagining and shaping the future, and what that means for the choices we face now.
If Films from the Future made you think about specific technologies differently, Future Rising will make you think about the future itself differently.
It's a quieter book — more personal, more philosophical — but it goes somewhere that the first book only points toward.
If the conversations you've been having with the AI guide have left you thinking about what it means to be human when machines can increasingly do what we do — write, reason, create, predict — then AI and the Art of Being Human, co-authored with Jeff Abbott, is another book that picks up exactly there.
Where Films from the Future asks big questions about technology, society, and the future, AI and the Art of Being Human gives you practical tools for navigating them.
It's built around four principles — Curiosity, Intentionality, Clarity, and Care — and twenty-one tools you can actually use in your work and life. It's for anyone asking "what makes me me when AI can finish my sentences, replicate my style, and predict my choices?" Which, if you've spent any time talking to the AI guide about the ideas in this book, is probably a question that feels more urgent now than it did before.
The ideas in Films from the Future didn't stop when the book was published. Andrew writes about the intersection of technology, society, and what it means to be human on his Substack, The Future of Being Human. This includes him reading the complete book in a podcast series — The Moviegoer's Guide to the Future.
And if you want something even more up to date, subscribe to the Modem Futura podcast, co-hosted by Andrew Maynard and Sean Leahy. This is a fast and engaging conversational podcast that grapples with emerging questions around technology, society, the future, and the challenges and opportunities of being human in a complex world.
This is perhaps the most important thing you can do! The AI guide is good at what it does. It can draw connections, surface frameworks, challenge your assumptions, and meet you where you are. But it doesn't have skin in the game. It doesn't have kids. It doesn't lie awake at night worrying about the world it's helping to build.
You do. And so do the people around you.
One of the arguments that runs through everything in the book, and everything Andrew writes, is that the questions raised by emerging technologies are too important to leave to experts — and too important to have only with an AI. If something in these conversations has stuck with you, talk about it with someone you trust. A partner, a colleague, a friend, the person at work who you suspect has the same nagging worries you do. The book's discussion questions are there for exactly this purpose, and the AI can surface them for any film or theme you're interested in. The future isn't something that happens to us. It's something we make. And we make it better in conversation with each other than we do alone.
Finally, if you disagree with something in the book, or something the AI said, or the entire premise of this project, Andrew wants to hear about it. The book is built on the conviction that these conversations need diverse perspectives, including perspectives that challenge my own. You can find him at andrewmaynard.net or on The Future of Being Human. He tries to read everything, but sometimes things get missed with the hundreds of emails a day he gets. So if you don't hear back, please do try again!