## Risk Innovation and Rethinking Risk

Most of Andrew Maynard's professional life has been involved with risk in one way or another. His early research focused on reducing health risks from inhaled particles. He worked extensively on the risks of nanotechnology. He has taught risk assessment, written about risk, and run academic centers devoted to risk. And if there is one thing all that experience has taught him, it is that he has less and less patience for how many people think about risk.

The problem, as *Films from the Future* lays it out, is that established approaches to risk work reasonably well for conventional technologies, but they run out of steam fast when we are facing technologies that can achieve things we never imagined. We are, in Maynard's Biblical metaphor, desperately trying to squeeze the new wine of technological innovation into the old wineskins of conventional risk thinking. At some point, something is going to give.

### Beyond Physical Harm

Traditional risk assessment tends to focus on measurable things: the probability of physical harm, the extent of environmental damage, the number of people affected. These are important, and they are not going away. But emerging technologies threaten things that are much harder to measure -- and, Maynard argues, just as important.

This is where the movies become unexpectedly revealing. In each film, the characters risk losing something of great importance. In [Jurassic Park](https://spoileralert.wtf/md-files/movies_jurassic_park.md), it is John Hammond's dream. In [Never Let Me Go](https://spoileralert.wtf/md-files/movies_never_let_me_go.md), it is Tommy's hope for the future. In [Ghost in the Shell](https://spoileralert.wtf/md-files/movies_ghost_in_the_shell.md), it is Major Kusanagi's sense of who and what she is. These are not physical risks. They are threats to dignity, belonging, identity, belief -- to things that are so important to us that our lives are diminished if they are taken away.

By revealing these less obvious risks, the movies open up new and powerful ways of thinking about developing technologies without causing unnecessary harm. The risk is not just that a technology might hurt someone physically. It is that it might erode what makes their life meaningful.

### What Is Risk Innovation?

This insight is at the heart of what Maynard calls "risk innovation" -- the framework where much of his current academic work lies. Over the past couple of hundred years, we have become quite adept at developing new ways of causing harm, and equally adept at developing methods of assessing and managing those risks. But those methods belong to a different world than the one we are now creating.

Risk innovation is the idea that, in order to navigate a radically shifting risk landscape, we need equally radical innovation in how we think about and act on risk. It means rethinking risk so that it revolves around threats to what is important to us -- not just what can be physically measured, but what we value, aspire to, and cannot bear to lose. Health and environmental safety remain essential. But so do the less tangible things: a community's sense of identity, an individual's autonomy, a society's capacity for trust.

This work connects directly to the Risk Innovation Nexus that Maynard established at Arizona State University, and to a career trajectory that has taken him from physicist to risk scientist to professor of Advanced Technology Transitions. It reflects a conviction that has grown over decades: the frameworks we use to govern technology must evolve as fast as the technologies themselves.

### Risk at the Core of Every Movie

Risk is at the core of every film in the book, though it is not always apparent that risk is what keeps you glued to the screen. Most of us think about risk in terms of someone's life being in danger or the environment being threatened, and there is plenty of that. But the movies also explore subtler dynamics. The tension in [Ex Machina](https://spoileralert.wtf/md-files/movies_ex_machina.md) comes not from the physical danger of an AI on the loose, but from the way it exploits human vulnerabilities. The drama in [The Man in the White Suit](https://spoileralert.wtf/md-files/movies_man_in_the_white_suit.md) arises from a scientist who never considered that his invention might threaten other people's livelihoods.

Watching these films with an open mind can reveal subtle connections between irresponsible innovation and threats to what people value. And those connections have profound implications for how we think about [responsible innovation](https://spoileralert.wtf/md-files/ntf_responsible_innovation_practice.md) and the question of [who gets to decide](https://spoileralert.wtf/md-files/ntf_everyone_has_a_role.md) how technologies are developed.

### A New Way of Seeing

Risk innovation is not a set of rules. It is a way of seeing. It asks us to look at emerging technologies and ask not just "what could go wrong?" but "what is at stake?" -- and to recognize that what is at stake extends well beyond what conventional risk frameworks are equipped to handle.

In a world of [converging technologies](https://spoileralert.wtf/md-files/ntf_technological_convergence.md) and [complex systems](https://spoileralert.wtf/md-files/ntf_complexity_chaos.md), this shift in perspective is not optional. It is essential. And it starts with a willingness to take seriously the things that matter most to people, even when -- especially when -- those things resist measurement.

## Further Reading

- [Could OpenAI have benefitted from this tool for navigating complex risks?](https://www.futureofbeinghuman.com/p/ai-and-risk-innovation) — Andrew Maynard introduces the Risk Innovation Planner, designed to help organizations identify "orphan risks" that are difficult to quantify but have outsized impact, demonstrating through an OpenAI case study how structured risk-navigation approaches can surface hidden social and ethical risks that conventional frameworks routinely miss.
- [Exploring AI Through Cause-and-Effect](https://www.futureofbeinghuman.com/p/exploring-ai-through-cause-and-effect) — Maynard presents six cause-and-effect models (linear, S-curve, exponential, hysteresis, jagged, and chaotic) for thinking through AI consequences, arguing that responsible innovation requires moving beyond simple input-output thinking to understanding complex system dynamics.
- [Risk Innovation Nexus — Arizona State University](https://riskinnovation.org/) — The Risk Innovation Nexus from the ASU Risk Innovation Lab, directed by Maynard, approaches risk as threats to value — encompassing dignity, autonomy, equity, and social trust beyond physical safety — providing practical tools including the Risk Innovation Planner and its framework of eighteen orphan risks for identifying hard-to-quantify social and ethical risks.
- [Risk-Sensitive Innovation: Leveraging Interactions Between Technologies — Sandbrink et al., Science and Public Policy (2024)](https://academic.oup.com/spp/article/51/6/1028/7724126) — This peer-reviewed article proposes managing risks from emerging technologies by leveraging interactions across a technology portfolio, preferentially advancing risk-reducing technologies while delaying risk-increasing ones — providing a concrete framework for portfolio-level risk thinking that moves beyond assessing individual technologies in isolation.
- [Towards the Digital Risk Society — Renn and Klinke, Human Affairs (2024)](https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/humaff-2023-0057/html) — This review argues we are entering a "digital risk society" where intangible technologies reshape the very nature of what is at stake, providing theoretical grounding for how technology risks extend beyond physical harm to threats to identity, social cohesion, and democratic integrity — the kind of expansive risk thinking central to risk innovation.
- [OECD Framework for Anticipatory Governance of Emerging Technologies (2024)](https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/framework-for-anticipatory-governance-of-emerging-technologies_0248ead5-en.html) — This landmark framework, adopted at the 2024 OECD Ministerial, establishes five interdependent governance elements and explicitly recognizes that emerging technologies carry risks to privacy, equity, and human rights requiring governance approaches that go beyond traditional harm-based risk assessment.
- [Rethinking Risk Management Strategy — Global Association of Risk Professionals (2025)](https://www.garp.org/risk-intelligence/culture-governance/rethinking-risk-management-strategy-251031) — This industry report finds that few organizations describe their risk management as "future ready," with roughly 40% admitting they are not prepared for the next major crisis, arguing for fundamental shifts toward risk management by design — recognizing that traditional frameworks built around quantifiable physical risks are inadequate for the volatile risk landscape of emerging technologies.
- [Successfully Bridging Innovation and Application: Exploring the Utility of a Risk Innovation Approach in the NSF Engineering Research Center for Advanced Biopreservation Technologies — Maynard et al., *Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics* 52(3), 2024](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-law-medicine-and-ethics/article/successfully-bridging-innovation-and-application-exploring-the-utility-of-a-risk-innovation-approach-in-the-nsf-engineering-research-center-for-advanced-biopreservation-technologies-atpbio/77F560BF3E4B3501577DB59B3B12C68B) — The first study to pilot the Risk Innovation framework in a multi-stakeholder collaborative research context, testing whether the approach — originally developed for startups — can help diverse public and private partners navigate the emerging risk landscape around advanced biopreservation technologies such as supercooling, vitrification, and nanoparticle-assisted rewarming. Published in a special issue on the ethical, legal, and policy challenges of technologies to stop biological time.