Modem Futura

Latest Episodes:

Synthetic Cells, Mirror Life, and the Future of Engineered Biology — with Emma Frow Jun 09, 2026

Show notes

What do we actually mean when we say we've made life in a lab? In this episode, Sean and Andrew welcome back ASU's Emma Frow — a researcher working at the rare intersection of bioengineering, governance, and care — to wander into one of the strangest frontiers in science: synthetic cells. Emma was one of roughly fifteen members of a National Academies committee tasked with thinking through the responsible innovation of synthetic cells, and as she tells it, the group spent its first six months simply trying to agree on what a synthetic cell is. It turns out there's no consensus — the term stretches from a humble bag of enzymes wrapped in a lipid membrane all the way to fully constructed, self-replicating organisms. From there the conversation moves into deeper water: What counts as living? Where does a cell end and a bundle of chemicals begin? And who, exactly, decides whether a new creation belongs to the world of chemical safety or biological oversight? The trio also takes on the unsettling idea of "mirror life" — organisms built from the opposite molecular handedness of everything that has ever lived — and the recent scientific reckoning over whether some doors are better left unopened. What emerges isn't fear, exactly, but a case for care: the recognition that biotechnology can't move at Silicon Valley speed, that containment is never perfect, and that the questions we ask matter as much as the things we build. It's a conversation about handedness and humility, about plasmids and power, and about why the slow, friction-filled work of asking "should we?" might be the most human technology of all.

Emma's ASU Bio - [web]

Read the Report: Supporting Responsible Innovation of Synthetic Cells: Biosafety, Biosecurity, and Environmental Considerations
2026 [Web]

-----

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

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: @ModemFutura

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.

-----

Alien Minds, Time Travelers, and Consciousness Backups: A Futures Thought Experiment Jun 02, 2026

Show notes

We're back for another round of Futures Improv — the segment where an AI-generated scenario lands on the table and we improvise our way through what it might mean for the rest of us. This time the spinner sends us into three very different futures, each one quietly serious underneath the play.

We open with the Solaris Problem: humanity makes first contact, but the intelligence on the other end is a moon-sized organism that communicates only by generating vivid hallucinations drawn from our own repressed memories. It isn't hostile. It isn't friendly. It may not even know we exist as separate beings. That sends us into the hard problem of consciousness, the limits of recognizing a mind that doesn't look like ours, and the slightly humbling observation that we still can't have a proper conversation with an octopus.

Then The Wells Reset: a time traveler arrives from the year 8,002,701 with one verified fact — humanity survived — and one question they're willing to answer before returning. They look sad. What do you ask? And, just as importantly, what do you choose not to ask?

We close with The Backup's Dilemma: every night while you sleep, your consciousness is copied to the cloud. Ten years in, the backups start dreaming differently than you do. Who, then, has the right to your marriage, your grudges, your name? And the question that always sneaks up behind it — how would you know you weren't already the backup?

Plus a wildcard run at first contact via TikTok, because of course.

A loose, playful episode that ends up somewhere genuinely strange. Bring your favorite metaphysical anxiety.

-----

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: @ModemFutura

Host Bios:

-----

Project Hail Mary, Dead Civilizations, and the Trouble with Feel-Good Endings May 26, 2026

Show notes

A timed episode (they gave themselves 35 minutes — barely made it) becomes an excuse for two arguments stitched together. First, Sean and Andrew finally have it out over Andy Weir's *Project Hail Mary*: Sean loved both the novel and the film; Andrew, while admitting it's an enjoyable piece of moviemaking, can't get past what he calls the sugar-coated solutionism baked into its core — a story that presents extreme utilitarian sacrifice as morally settled rather than morally contested. The conversation widens out from there: when adversity becomes a turning point in one survivor's story, what happens to the ninety-nine who didn't make it? When a film blends real science and invented science, who gets to tell the audience which is which? Then the timer pushes them into the return of Futures Improv, where Sean reads AI-generated speculative scenarios to Andrew cold. Two land. In "The Fermi Paradox Answered Badly," they imagine a sky full of automated distress signals from dead civilizations — and arrive at a chilling possibility: maybe the beacon *is* the extinction event, a galactic mind virus that collapses societies through the act of warning them. In "The Heptapod Update," a Ted Chiang–inspired scenario about a neural implant that installs a time-rewiring language sends them into the contested territory of consciousness, psychedelics, and whether language can change reality or only our perception of it. By the end, two threads converge: every scenario this week was really about the same question — what we do, or fail to do, when we receive a signal we can't unhear.

-----

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: @ModemFutura

Host Bios:

-----

School's Out for Summer: AI, Vibe Coding, and What Teaching Still Requires May 19, 2026

Show notes

What happens when the semester ends and you finally have a moment to look back at what just happened? In this episode, Sean and Andrew sit down for an honest, reflective conversation about what it actually looks like to teach at a university in 2025 — not the polished version you hear at conferences, but the messy, exhausting, exhilarating reality of it. Sean just wrapped three compressed courses in seven weeks — all new — and uses the moment to reflect on how AI tools, especially vibe coding, quietly transformed parts of his teaching practice this semester. From building interactive HTML primers in 20 minutes to vibe coding a fully functional Jeopardy review game for graduate students, these weren't flashy demonstrations of technology — they were bridges built in real time to meet students where they actually were. But the conversation goes deeper than tools. Sean and Andrew explore why teaching remains fundamentally relational — why trust between instructor and student is the real infrastructure that makes AI use in the classroom work (or not). They wrestle with the difference between access to information and genuine learning, why modeling what it means to be a knowledge professional matters more than ever, and why the push to scale education through AI agents misses something essential about how humans actually learn. Woven through it all is a quiet appreciation for educators at every level — from the chemistry professor with chalk-dusted elbow patches to the K-12 teachers holding entire communities together. This isn't a roadmap for AI in education. It's a semester's worth of hard-won insight, offered with warmth, humor, and the kind of honesty that only comes when the grades are finally in.

-----

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: @ModemFutura

Host Bios:

-----

The Dawkins Effect: Why Even Skeptics Fall for AI Consciousness May 12, 2026

Show notes

When Richard Dawkins — the man who gave us The Selfish Gene and decades of rigorous scientific skepticism — published an essay declaring that Claude, an AI chatbot, might be conscious, the internet had feelings. Some cheered. Many cringed. But on this episode of Modem Futura, hosts Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard sit down with returning guest Punya Mishra to ask a harder question: if it can happen to Dawkins, what does that say about the rest of us?

The conversation moves quickly past the easy takedown. Mishra, whose own intellectual foundations were shaped by Dawkins' writing, brings a deeply personal lens — discovering The Selfish Gene as a teenager in a British Council library, then watching his intellectual hero fall for the very illusions his tools of skepticism should have caught. The trio explores what Andrew calls the "cognitive Trojan horse" — how AI bypasses our epistemic defenses not through deception but through honest non-signals: fluent language, apparent effort, and conversational warmth that cost the machine nothing but trigger everything in us that evolved to build trust with other humans.

Drawing on theory of mind, Kahneman's dual-process thinking, evolutionary psychology, and even the spandrels of San Marco, this episode asks whether our oldest cognitive armor might be our greatest vulnerability. And it raises a question nobody can quite answer yet: if a technology taps into something this deep about who we are, what happens to the middle of the bell curve — the billions of people using these tools with no idea what they're really interacting with?

-----

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: @ModemFutura

Host Bios:

-----

Convergence Day: Opus 4.7 and the Reliability Question May 05, 2026

Show notes

Something has changed with Claude — not catastrophically, not visibly, just enough that the writers, researchers, and builders who'd come to rely on it have started to notice the seams. What does it mean when a tool you've come to think of as a creative partner quietly becomes someone slightly different? When the thing you depended on yesterday isn't quite the same thing you're working with today, and no one tells you? Drawing on a clearly traceable timeline of recent shifts — adaptive thinking made mandatory, hidden routing tiers, verbosity caps, expanded safeguards beginning to block legitimate creative and academic work — they trace how the launch of Anthropic's Opus 4.7 has surfaced a question that goes well beyond any single model release. What is our relationship to a technology that can be re-tuned beneath our feet? The conversation moves through the tension between liquid platforms and personal agency, why mission-critical workflows now feel suddenly fragile, whether a frozen or locally-hosted model might become the next quiet luxury for serious users, and what it really means to build a *relationship* with something that, by design, won't sit still. Along the way, Andrew shares an unexpected workaround that started getting him better writing back — giving Claude permission to be itself rather than him — and Sean offers a small "canary in the coal mine" trick that anyone using these tools can borrow today. This isn't an episode about whether AI is good or bad. It's an episode about what it means to depend on something you can't see, can't freeze, and can't fully know — and what kind of humans we are becoming while we figure it out.

-----

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: @ModemFutura

Host Bios:

-----

The Jagged Frontier: Reading Stanford's Human Centered 2026 AI Index Apr 28, 2026

Show notes

A system that can win gold at the International Mathematical Olympiad but can't read an analog clock. A technology being adopted faster than almost anything in modern history, yet only six percent of teachers say their schools have clear policies for how students should use it. A 50-point gap between what AI experts believe is coming and what the public thinks. These are the strange, jagged contours of the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute's newly released 2026 AI Index — a 400-plus page map of where we actually are with this technology — and the jumping-off point for this week's conversation. Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard ping-pong through the report's top takeaways, lingering where the findings get most human: what it means that responsible AI development is lagging behind AI capability, how formal education is being quietly rewritten by learners moving faster than institutions, why the "adjacent possible" keeps expanding every time a new model ships, and whether access to AI is on its way to becoming something closer to infrastructure than product. Along the way: the difference between ethical AI and responsible AI, what happens when everyone is a sorcerer, the TSMC chokepoint quietly shaping geopolitics, the closing US–China capability gap, and a thought experiment about AI small talk — burning planet-scale compute to ask what's for dinner. Less a review of a report than a chance to sit with what it's telling us, this episode asks what kind of future we're drifting into and who gets a say in shaping it. Because if there's a theme running through the 2026 Index, it's this: the technology is moving. Everything else — policy, pedagogy, responsibility, imagination — is racing to catch up.

See the report: https://hai.stanford.edu/news

-----

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: @ModemFutura

Host Bios:

-----

Mythos and the Sorcerer's Apprentice: When AI Outruns Our Wisdom Apr 21, 2026

Show notes

Anthropic's unreleased "Mythos" model surfaced thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities nobody had ever caught — some buried in trusted software for nearly three decades — and the company decided it was too powerful to ship. That single admission is the jumping-off point for this week's conversation, which quickly widens into something older and stranger than a cybersecurity story. Sean and Andrew find themselves back in Disney's Fantasia, watching Mickey Mouse put on a hat he hasn't earned, flood the workshop, and fail to undo what he started. The Sorcerer's Apprentice is usually read as a warning about technology we don't understand, but they pull at other threads: curiosity as a necessary human trait, the discomfort of experts suddenly demoted to novices, and what it means when the gap between raw power and the wisdom to use it well is widening faster than any of our institutions can keep up. Along the way: zero-day exploits explained without the jargon, "script kitties" and their AI-era descendants, the quietly uncomfortable economics of million-dollar model tiers, and a cameo from Goethe by way of Strega Nona. None of it resolves — which is the point. The question the episode leaves open isn't whether we can close the gap between power and wisdom, but whether the only way through is to stop pretending we're the sorcerer and start, humbly and repeatedly, becoming the apprentice again.

-----

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: @ModemFutura

Host Bios:

-----

Artemis II: The Science, the Wonder, and the Future of Being Human Apr 14, 2026

Show notes

For the first time since 1972, human beings have traveled to the vicinity of the moon — and on this episode of Modem Futura, Sean and Andrew sit with what that actually means. Recorded while the Artemis II crew was still in transit, this conversation is less a mission briefing and more a meditation on wonder: what it feels like to watch a tiny spacecraft carry four people a thousand times farther than the International Space Station, and why we seem almost hardwired to shrug at the extraordinary. The conversation ranges from the mind-bending physics of orbital mechanics — you don't fly to the moon, you fly to where it's going to be — to the surprisingly grounding banality of broken toilets and malfunctioning Microsoft Outlook at 250,000 miles from home. Sean and Andrew dig into the science aboard the Orion capsule, from sleep and immune research to radiation monitoring and organ-on-a-chip experiments, raising the deeper question: what does it actually take to make human beings safe in deep space? They explore the ethical gap between government and commercial space programs, the Shackleton-era question of whether exploration requires a return ticket, and what The Expanse gets right about how long-term spaceflight might quietly, irreversibly reshape the human body. Grounding it all is something harder to name — a particular kind of awe at the thinness of the atmosphere visible in those early lunar images, at a 10-year-old kid at the launch site who just couldn't believe we're going to the moon. This episode is an invitation to look up and sit with that feeling for a moment before the meh sets in.

-----

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: @ModemFutura

Host Bios:

-----

Two Tools That Will Change How You Think About the Future Apr 07, 2026

Show notes

What if the future wasn't something that arrived all at once — but more like a series of waves, some barely visible on the horizon, others already crashing around your feet? In this episode, Sean and Andrew explore two of the most practical and enduringly useful tools in the futures and foresight toolkit: the **Three Horizons Framework** and the **Futures Wheel**. These aren't crystal ball exercises — they're structured ways of thinking that help you *position* yourself in relation to change, rather than predict it. The Three Horizons model, originally developed by Bill Sharpe, maps the tension between the dominant present (H1), the emergent and disruptive future (H3), and the messy, turbulent, almost-impossible-to-define middle ground (H2) where most innovation — and most anxiety — actually lives. From early electric vehicles to the current AI landscape, the conversation draws on concrete examples to show how these horizons shift and how knowing which one you're operating in can make or break a strategy. Then comes the Futures Wheel, developed by Jerome Glenn in 1971 — a deceptively simple tool for tracing first, second, and third-order consequences of any change. Using AI's impact on coding as a live example, Sean and Andrew demonstrate how the wheel opens up a 360-degree view of possibility that linear thinking never quite reaches. Whether you're leading a startup, making a career pivot, or just trying to make sense of why the world keeps feeling like it's speeding up, these tools offer something rare: structure without rigidity, and clarity without false certainty. This episode is a masterclass in futures literacy — practical, playful, and surprisingly relevant to wherever you find yourself right now.

-----

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: @ModemFutura

Host Bios:

-----

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected