Modem Futura

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 unlike...

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...

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...

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 mi...

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 res...

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 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...

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...

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 t...

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,...

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 contou...

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 fi...

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...

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 exercis...

What if the biggest risk right now isn't moving too slowly — it's optimizing for a world that no longer exists? That's one of the central provocations in this episode, as Sean and Andrew dig into the newly released "Exploring the Futures of Technology 2.0" report from the Copenhagen Institute of Future Studies. Fresh from attending the report's launch event in Denmark, Andrew brings firsthand pers...

What does it mean for a civilization to truly master power — and what happens to human nature when scarcity is no longer an excuse? In this spring break edition of Modem Futura, Sean and Andrew take their favorite format out for a spin: Futures Improv. Starting with the Kardashev Scale — the Soviet astronomer's 1964 framework for measuring civilizational advancement by energy use — they quickly tu...

Something is happening with AI that almost nobody is talking about — and the reason nobody's talking about it is because, by design, you can't see it. In this episode, Sean and Andrew dig into what Sean calls "the invisible upgrade": the quiet, compounding transformation taking place not in the AI-generated artifacts people are frantically trying to detect, but deep inside the cognitive workflows...

What if thinking about the future isn't about predicting what will happen — but about mapping what could? In this episode of Modem Futura, Sean and Andrew dive deep into one of the most foundational tools in futures studies: the Futures Cone. Originally developed by Joseph Voros, the cone is a deceptively simple framework that helps individuals, organizations, and communities move beyond the comfo...

What happens when you dig through a box of old iPods and realize the tangled cables might be the least complicated thing you pull out? In this episode of Modem Futura, Sean and Andrew unpack—literally—a collection of vintage Apple devices, a $35 Kodak keychain camera, and a miniature Polaroid to explore a question that keeps getting bigger the more you sit with it: what are we quietly losing in th...

What does it actually look like to thrive — not just survive — in an era of rapid AI integration? In this episode, Sean and Andrew go behind the scenes on their  sold out workshop at ASU's 2026 FOLC Fest, designed for higher education educators navigating the messy, uncertain terrain of AI in teaching and learning. Rather than debating whether AI belongs in the classroom (a conversation they argue...

In this episode of Modem Futura, Sean and Andrew explore Isaac Asimov's remarkably prescient 1951 short story "The Fun They Had," a brief, brilliant tale set in 2155 where two children discover a paper book—an artifact from a forgotten era—and begin questioning everything about their own AI-driven, hyper-personalized education. Written decades before the personal computer existed, Asimov imagined...

Something unexpected is happening in the world of software: it's becoming personal again. In this episode of Modem Futura, Sean and Andrew explore the rapidly expanding phenomenon of vibe coding—the practice of describing what you want in plain language and letting a generative AI build it for you. What starts as a practical conversation about creating web apps and custom tools quickly opens into...

What do kids actually think about the future they're inheriting? In this special episode, Sean and Andrew are joined by an unexpected guest: Freddie Leahy, Sean's almost-10-year-old son and aspiring paleontologist. What unfolds is a surprisingly nuanced conversation about artificial intelligence, creativity, and what it means to do meaningful work. Freddie arrives with a question that might surpri...

In this episode of Modem Futura , hosts Sean M. Leahy and Andrew Maynard dive deep into Pluribus , the provocative new Apple TV series from Vince Gilligan . Framed as an inversion of the classic zombie apocalypse, Pluribus imagines a world where humanity is absorbed into a peaceful, hyper-ethical hive mind—leaving only a handful of unassimilated individuals behind. The conversation explores what m...

What does it mean to take the temperature of the world's anxieties? Each year, the World Economic Forum asks over a thousand experts across the globe to weigh what keeps them up at night—and the resulting Global Risks Report offers something more valuable than prediction: a map of collective concern. In this episode, Sean and Andrew dig into the 2026 report, which landed with striking timing as th...