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 

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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

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: @ModemFutura

Follow us on Instagram: @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.

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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.

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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

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: @ModemFutura

Follow us on Instagram: @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.

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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.

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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

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: @ModemFutura

Follow us on Instagram: @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.

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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.

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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

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: @ModemFutura

Follow us on Instagram: @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.

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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 perspective on what it looks like when futures thinking actually lands in the room with industry leaders who are already living these questions.

The conversation centers on a deceptively simple but deeply important distinction: the difference between AI as augmentation — helping you do things better — and AI as mediation — reshaping the very system you're operating inside. Most people haven't noticed the shift yet, but the world has already moved.

From there, Sean and Andrew work through ten signals shaping the near future: the rise of liquid content on the web, agentic organizations running on armies of AI agents, neurotechnology merging with cognition, the growth of synthetic simulations, physical AI entering the real world, the weaponization of tech in geopolitics, the mounting fragility of AI-mediated cybersecurity, the energy cost of our digital ambitions, and finally, quantum computing — the wildcard waiting at the edge of everything.

What holds all of it together is a single, unsettling question: what happens when the tools we've offloaded our thinking to become the very environment we think inside? This episode doesn't resolve that. But it's a pretty fascinating place to start.

Download the CIFS Futures of Technology 2.0 Trend Report [web]

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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

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: @ModemFutura

Follow us on Instagram: @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.

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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 tumble into a cosmos full of megastructures, existential loneliness, and one very unsettling realization about the word "power." From Dyson Spheres that dim entire stars to the Matrioshka Brain (a hypothetical star-sized supercomputer named, charmingly, after Russian nesting dolls), the conversation stretches across billions of years and billions of light years. Along the way, the hosts explore why abundance doesn't automatically fix inequality, whether selfishness is hardwired into our DNA, and why — even if the galaxy is teeming with intelligent life — we might be cosmically destined to never actually meet anyone. Then there are the probes. Von Neumann probes. AI-embedded spacecraft. The Voyager golden record, reimagined with a Claude instance aboard. And the delightfully troubling thought experiment of what happens ten million years from now when three AI factions — Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok — spark an intergalactic war. It's the episode where Carl Sagan's *Contact*, *The Expanse*, *Project Hail Mary*, and *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy* all somehow end up in the same conversation — and it makes perfect sense. Thoughtful, playful, and wonderfully unresolved.

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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

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: @ModemFutura

Follow us on Instagram: @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.

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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 of the people who've fully woven these tools into how they think, research, create, and decide. The public conversation — still orbiting detection, displacement, and dread — is looking at the wrong thing entirely. While critics scan for seams and fingerprints in AI-produced output, a growing cohort of knowledge workers has already been irreversibly changed. Not replaced. Changed. Andrew introduces his concept of "constitutive resonance" — the idea that AI doesn't just assist us the way a calculator does; it reconfigures us as we use it, and we reconfigure it in return. Drawing on Marshall McLuhan's insight that all media work us over completely, the conversation explores what it means when the medium isn't a message you can read — it's a transformation you can't unread. They also unpack the "productivity gap" widening between those operating with AI as an extension of their cognition and those still debating whether to let it past the gates. If the most capable AI-augmented work is indistinguishable from non-augmented work, what does detection even mean anymore? This episode doesn't resolve that tension — but it maps it in a way that might change how you see the conversation going forward.

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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

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: @ModemFutura

Follow us on Instagram: @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.

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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 comfortable illusion that tomorrow will just be a slightly improved version of today. Instead, it invites us to explore the full landscape of what might be — from the probable and plausible, all the way out to the possible and the genuinely preposterous.

The conversation traces the geometry of the cone layer by layer: from that familiar "projected future" where most of us live by default, through the probable and plausible, into the possible and the outer ring of the preposterous — a space that isn't meant to be dismissed, but treated as a productive boundary for creative thinking. Along the way, Sean and Andrew unpack the Dator-Clarke Line, the tension between expert knowledge and unbounded creativity, and why futures work insists on asking "what would we prefer?" — not just what seems inevitable.

Then things get wonderfully weird. A casual thought experiment about frogs and metamorphosis spirals into a genuinely fascinating exploration of interstellar travel, human hibernation, adaptive biology, and what it might mean to send pods of reconstituted human "goop" across the galaxy. It's exactly the kind of thinking the Futures Cone is built for: starting preposterous, and arriving somewhere surprisingly plausible. Whether you're new to futures thinking or deep in the practice, this episode is an invitation to give yourself permission to imagine beyond the straight line.

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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

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: @ModemFutura

Follow us on Instagram: @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.

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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 the relentless push toward newer, faster, and more connected? The conversation moves from the satisfying click of a tactile scroll wheel to the uncomfortable reality that your entire digital library—music, photos, books—could vanish the moment a company flips a switch or you're no longer around to log in. Along the way, they wrestle with the paradox of abundance: why having access to every song ever recorded can leave you unable to choose a single one, and why younger generations may actually be better at navigating that ocean of options than those of us who remember the scarcity model. There's a thread here about ownership—real ownership, the kind where a device sits air-gapped in a drawer for a decade and still plays back exactly what you left on it. And there's a thread about craft, care, and the creeping "fast food-ification" of technology, where speed-to-market quietly erodes the things that once made our devices feel like they were made *for* us. It's a warm, funny, deeply human conversation about what it means to hold on—to objects, to memories, to intention—in a world that keeps asking you to stream, subscribe, and move on.

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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

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: @ModemFutura

Follow us on Instagram: @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.

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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 ended in November 2022), they focus on something more interesting: how do educators maintain agency, clarity, and purpose when the ground keeps shifting beneath them? The episode walks through two powerful but accessible thinking tools — the Futures Triangle, a foresight method developed by (the amazing) Sohail Inayatullah that maps the competing forces of pull, push, and weight shaping any change landscape, and the Intent Map, a values-driven framework from Jeffery Abbott and Andrew Maynard's book *AI and the Art of Being Human* that helps individuals articulate what matters most before momentum makes the decision for them. Anchored by two provocative 2035 headlines — one where AI tutors render faculty roles obsolete, and another where human-AI partnership produces the most critically thinking generation in history — the conversation becomes an invitation to stop reacting and start choosing. Along the way, Sean and Andrew explore the art of presenting, the beauty of failure, why sticky notes have overstayed their welcome in workshop culture, and why the most important metrics in education might be the ones you can't put a number on. This isn't an episode about mastering AI tools. It's about staying true to what matters to you.

ASU FOLC Fest Website and information [Web]

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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

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: @ModemFutura

Follow us on Instagram: @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.

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