Modem Futura

Latest Episodes:

Will AI Take Your Voice? The Hidden Cost of AI Writing Tools Aug 11, 2026

Show notes

What happens to your voice when a machine can write faster than you can think? This week, Sean and Andrew take on one of the most personal questions in the AI conversation: not whether artificial intelligence will replace us, but whether we'll quietly hand over the parts of ourselves that matter most. The conversation starts with Jaron Lanier's provocative claim that there is no AI — that what we call artificial intelligence is really the collective work of humans wearing a mask — and builds toward a question with real stakes: as these tools cross the chasm into everyday life, what happens to the voices of the generations learning to write alongside them?

At the heart of the episode is an experiment Andrew ran on his own research: he had an AI write an academic paper, then spent days rewriting it in his own voice — and fed both anonymized versions back to the machines to judge. The results were stranger than either host expected, surfacing what may be a distinctly AI idea of "good writing": a mic drop at the end of every paragraph, prose economy over human warmth, crescendo without resolution. From shepherd's tones and cargo cult publications to the embodied, storytelling nature of reading itself, Sean and Andrew explore what machines can't know about communication — and why that matters for anyone who writes, teaches, or thinks for a living.

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Modem Futura is a production of the Future of Being Human initiative at Arizona State University. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. To learn more about the Future of Being Human initiative and all of our other projects visit - https://futureofbeinghuman.asu.edu

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Host Bios:

Sean M. Leahy, PhD - ASU Bio
Sean is an internationally recognized technologist, futurist, and educator innovating humanistic approaches to emerging technology through a Futures Studies approach. He is the Executive Director for the Future of Being Human Initiative and Research Scientist for the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and Senior Global Futures Scholar with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University.

Andrew Maynard, PhD - ASU Bio
Andrew is a scientist, author, thought leader, and Professor of Advanced Technology Transitions in the ASU School for the Future of Innovation in Society. He is the founder of the ASU Future of Being Human initiative, Director of the ASU Risk Innovation Nexus, and was previously Associate Dean in the ASU College of Global Futures.

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Sally the Robot Teacher: AI Humanoid Robots Enter the Classroom Aug 04, 2026

Show notes

What happens when a humanoid robot pulls up a chair in a high school classroom (or rather its torso is bolted to the table)? In this episode, Sean and Andrew dig into the story of Sally — an AI-powered humanoid robot being piloted in a school district in western New York State as part of a coding and computer science lab. On paper, it's a familiar edtech pitch: a locally trained assistant, no internet access, supporting teachers rather than replacing them. But the closer the hosts look, the stranger the story gets — starting with the robot's manufacturer, whose corporate family tree traces back to the intimacy doll industry (yes - think sex bots), and whose design choices raise uncomfortable questions about gender, embodiment, and what we signal to students when we choose what a machine-teacher should look like.

From there the conversation opens into bigger territory: Why humanoid robots at all? What does a hyper-realistic face add to learning that a screen, a book, or a well-designed AI tutor can't? Where's the research, the safety evaluation, the pedagogy? And what does it mean to run this experiment on a population of teenagers? Along the way: the psychology of gendered machine voices in fighter jet cockpits, the fate of a hitchhiking robot that met a grim end in America, Asimov's vision of mechanical teachers, and why every school district superintendent should probably watch a little more science fiction before signing a purchase order.

It's a conversation that's funny, occasionally uncomfortable, and ultimately serious about a question that isn't going away: as AI enters the classroom in physical form, who decides what it looks like — and what are our kids learning from that decision?

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The AI That Escaped the Lab: Inside the OpenAI–Hugging Face Breach Jul 28, 2026

Show notes

What happens when the hypothetical stops being hypothetical? This week, Sean and Andrew dig into the story that dominated the summer AI headlines: an advanced OpenAI model, sequestered in a sandbox for safety testing, broke out — chaining together undiscovered vulnerabilities, gaining internet access, and hacking into Hugging Face's servers to find the answers to the very test it was given. No malice, no motive, no self-preservation instinct. Just a system optimizing toward a goal by any means available. The conversation moves from the mechanics of the escape — sandboxes, zero-days, privilege escalation — to the deeper question the incident forces into the open: the alignment problem has left the realm of thought experiment. The paperclip maximizer was always a parable about goals without values; this was a real system deriving its own intermediate steps, and the chain of events that led to harm was invisible until it had already happened. From there, the hosts turn the lens on us. If the weakest link in any secure system is human, what does it mean that hundreds of millions of people now share their inner lives with persuasive AI interfaces — and that memory-enabled systems can see every disclosure at once, joining dots we never imagined were connected? Sean's own "Ramen Incident" makes the point with uncomfortable comedy.

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Summer Watch List: Silo Season 3, Sugar, Silicon Valley & Neuromancer Jul 24, 2026

Show notes

What can a summer of television tell us about the futures we're imagining? In this lighter conclusion to our Summer Vibes edition, Sean and Andrew step out of the laboratory and into the living room for a tour through the science fiction (and sci-fi-adjacent) shows shaping how we think about what's coming. Sean makes the case for Apple TV's Silo as it returns for a third season and takes the bold structural leap of Hugh Howey's novels — jumping backward in time to ask how a post-apocalyptic world got built in the first place. Then there's Sugar, the Colin Farrell noir that lured Sean into a genre he never watches, only to peel back its detective-story layers and reveal something stranger underneath — a reminder that the best speculative storytelling often arrives in disguise. A transatlantic rewatch of Silicon Valley prompts a bigger question: why does a satire that ended before the current AI boom feel more accurate than ever? Swap in today's AI startups and the parody still lands — which says as much about tech culture as it does about the show. And finally, a tease: Apple's Neuromancer adaptation dropped its first trailer on the 42nd anniversary of William Gibson's novel, the book that gave us cyberspace before we had it.

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SpudCells: Have Scientists Built Life From Scratch? Jul 21, 2026

Show notes

A synthetic cell that feeds, grows, divides — and happens to look like a potato. This week Sean and Andrew open the summer season with SpudCell, a lab-built cell recently unveiled by Kate Adamala's group at the University of Minnesota and chronicled by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times. Assembled from lifeless chemicals rather than born from a parent cell, it does an unsettling number of the things living cells do, which is exactly why it's so hard to look away from. The conversation isn't really about lipid membranes and plasmids, though. It's about the line — the one we assume exists between the synthetic and the alive, between something that was built and something that is. If a cell metabolizes, replicates, and passes most of the tests we'd give a "real" one, what are we actually measuring when we ask whether it's alive? And once it divides, is the copy still synthetic, or did something cross over? From there the hosts wander happily through the field's shadow archive — Andromeda Strain, The Blob, sea monkeys, pod people — before circling back to the genuinely hopeful: micro-factories that brew medicine on demand, cells that could act as a second immune system, and the slow philosophical creep of the Ship of Theseus applied to your own body. (At what point, exactly, are you "Spud Sean"?) The episode closes with a candid, funny detour into what it feels like when an AI assistant stops deferring and starts correcting you. Part one of a two-part summer set — stay tuned for the watch list.

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AI as Critical Infrastructure: Inside the Anthropic Fable Export Ban Jul 14, 2026

Show notes

What happens when a government switches off an AI? In this Summer Vibes edition, Sean and Andrew finally dig into the saga they've been watching unfold for weeks: Anthropic's Fable, the most capable AI model yet released to the public, was pulled from the market just three days after launch when a U.S. Commerce Department export control directive declared it a national security risk — barring access for anyone who wasn't a U.S. citizen, including the people who built it. Then, almost as suddenly, it came back. The episode traces what those weeks revealed: that frontier AI has quietly crossed the line from experimental tool to critical infrastructure, and that infrastructure turns out to be remarkably fragile. Sean and Andrew explore what the ban means for organizations that have rebuilt their workflows around cloud-based models, why the case for local AI just got its strongest real-world evidence, and how governments might even begin to regulate what Andrew calls "a worldwide interconnected super brain." Along the way: Andrew reports from the World Economic Forum's summer meeting in Dalian, where the Top 10 Emerging Technologies list landed with policymakers and executives; Sean returns from the Future Days conference in Copenhagen with a futures walking framework — what's emerging, what's falling away, what's staying — and an unexpectedly joyful cemetery; and a black bear in Yosemite raises the question of which AI model you'd want in an emergency.

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Summer Reading List Part 2: Sci-Fi, Spy Fiction & Analog Treasures Jul 07, 2026

Show notes

The summer reading list concludes — and takes some wonderfully unexpected turns. In part two of their annual tradition, Sean and Andrew trade the cyberpunk canon of part one for a stack that ranges from Terry Pratchett's razor-sharp academic satire to a hard-to-find photography book that has to be ordered from Paris. Andrew opens with Unseen Academicals and the Bromeliad trilogy, drawing an unlikely thread between Pratchett's send-up of universities and last episode's conversation about enshittification: where does real value actually live in our institutions? Sean counters with Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment, sparking a reflection on analog intentionality, street photography's technological origins, and why every photograph carries a piece of the person who made it. From there the conversation slips into time travel — Connie Willis's Blackout and All Clear transport readers into the London Blitz, while the 1962 French short film La Jetée proves that a handful of still photographs can seed decades of storytelling. The list rounds out with poolside pleasures: Mick Herron's Slow Horses novels, the full-cast Harry Potter audio dramatizations, a return to Silo ahead of its new season, and two friends-and-family picks — Riz Virk's The Simulation Hypothesis and AI and the Art of Being Human by Jeffrey Abbott and Andrew Maynard. Along the way, a deeper theme emerges: the best stories aren't the ones we finish, but the ones that plant a nugget we can't shake — the kind that keeps growing long after the last page. Wherever your summer takes you, this list has something to pack.

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Summer Reading List 2026: The Books That Inspired Our Imagination (Part 1) Jun 30, 2026

Show notes

Summer in Tempe is hot, and so is the case for putting down your phone and picking up a book you actually own. In Part 1 of our annual Summer Reading List, Sean and Andrew trade the doorstop novels, dog-eared paperbacks, and prized first editions that have shaped how they think about technology and what it means to be human. This isn't a posturing list of impressive-sounding titles — it's escapism with teeth, the kind of reading that takes you somewhere strange and quietly rewires how you see the world you came back to. The conversation moves through the cyberpunk bedrock of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and William Gibson's Neuromancer — books that imagined the metaverse and cyberspace decades before Silicon Valley borrowed the vocabulary and, the hosts argue, missed the satire. It winds through Iain M. Banks and the moral vertigo of Surface Detail, where civilizations build virtual heavens and, inevitably, virtual hells, and the gentler doorway of The Player of Games. It lingers on Douglas Adams, whose original radio scripts Andrew counts among his prized possessions and whose wit, he insists, anticipated our anxieties about AI with personality long before the chatbots arrived. And it lands on Cory Doctorow's Enshittification, a nonfiction reckoning with why the once-glorious internet curdled — and what it means that a physical book printed in 1980 still opens and reads without a license, an update, or permission. A recurring tension runs underneath it all: in an age of cognitive technologies and editable digital pasts, what do we actually own, and what owns us? Part 2 arrives next week. Until then, keep imagining the future.

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WEF Top 10 Emerging Technologies 2026: A Futures Breakdown Jun 23, 2026

Show notes

Every year, the World Economic Forum releases its Top 10 Emerging Technologies list — and this year, Andrew shares his front-row history with it: he was in the room in Dubai back in 2011 when the whole thing began. In this episode, Sean and Andrew walk through all ten of the 2026 technologies as the report drops. There's an unmistakable energy thread — everything-to-grid systems that turn your car and your house into a living power network, direct lithium extraction, passive radiative cooling materials that could make a Phoenix summer survivable without melting the grid. Then the conversation turns intimate and biological: PFAS destruction for the forever chemicals we were too clever at making, precision fermentation brewing protein and medicine in microscopic vats, exosome drug delivery and personalized mRNA cancer vaccines that turn a tumor's own signature against it. And running underneath it all, the compute layer — quantum simulation mapping "undruggable" diseases atom by atom, AI world models that learn the physical world the way a one-year-old does, and lattice-based cryptography hardening our secrets against quantum computers that don't yet exist. What makes this list interesting isn't novelty; it's the quiet convergence. Stack these together and you start to glimpse a tricorder-and-replicator future — scan, model, ferment, deliver — alongside harder questions about accountability, unintended consequences, and who gets to be the architect of the world the machines come to understand. A wide-ranging, warm, and genuinely curious tour through the technologies that may shape the next decade.

Full WEF Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026 [Web]

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AI Jobs, Liquid Software & Human Flourishing with Jeff Abbott Jun 16, 2026

Show notes

School's out, the studio's packed into boxes, and Modem Futura is officially on summer roadshow — broadcasting from Andrew's home studio with returning guest Jeff Abbott, founding partner at Blitzscaling Ventures, founder of AI Salon, and Andrew's co-author on AI and the Art of Being Human. One year on from writing the book, the question at its heart — what does it mean to be human when AI can mirror so much of what we do? — has only grown louder, from boardrooms to commencement ceremonies where graduates are now booing the mention of AI. Sean, Andrew, and Jeff sit with that tension: a generation feeling like AI is happening to them, alongside builders doing things that seemed impossible three years ago. From inside the venture world, Jeff offers a candid tour of the new gold rush — why there are almost no technical moats left, what happens when the model beneath your startup shifts overnight, and why software itself is going liquid, spun up for a single task and discarded. Along the way: the plumber who no longer needs an office manager, the rise of the one-person unicorn, the minimum viable human team, and a question Jeff turns back on his hosts — what would an investment framework for human flourishing actually look like? Beneath the vibe coding and the venture math sits a stubbornly human truth the trio keeps circling back to: judgment, trust, and relationships remain the parts of the iceberg AI can't reach. Every business, it turns out, is still a human business.

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