Modem Futura

When Tesla's redesigned Roadster crawled up an inverted ramp, clung there upside down, and then flipped itself back onto its wheels on bursts of compressed air, it invited two very different reactions: awe at the engineering, and an eye-roll at the spectacle. In this episode of Modem Futura, Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard try to hold both at once. They unpack what was actually shown at the October reveal (cold-gas thrusters developed with SpaceX, an underbody fan system that lets the car quite literally suck itself to a surface, and a claimed 0.81-second sprint to 60 mph) and why so much of it reads less like a product than the most lavishly funded science fair project imaginable. From there, the conversation turns to something bigger than cars: what happens to imagination when we only allow it inside the lines? Sean shares the story of a high school mousetrap car that became a model-rocket-powered missile, and earned a D for its trouble. The hosts explore the difference between a playpen and a playground, why "serious play" may be a contradiction in terms, and how the language of innovation so often asks for the outputs of play without permitting the process. They also wrestle with a harder question: how do you celebrate genuinely playful engineering when it is fronted by someone with outsized wealth and influence? Along the way: futurist Jim Dator's reminder that any useful idea about the future should appear ridiculous, the flying car as one of our most persistent borrowed futures, fan-car physics, the spinoff argument for wild experiments. A conversation about spectacle, speed, and the permission to be ridiculous, and who gets to have it.

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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 ask a frontier AI model to do something a spreadsheet could finish in five minutes? Two years and 110 episodes into Modem Futura, Sean Leahy found out by asking AI to add up the show's total runtime. Twenty-five minutes, a small swarm of agents, and one offer to simply estimate the missing episodes later, the answer arrived, sending Andrew Maynard straight to Douglas Adams and the starship computer that seized up trying to make Arthur Dent a proper cup of tea. That detour sets up the heart of the episode: what AI can and can't do in designing a university course. Both hosts have leaned on AI as a kind of private instructional designer, and both describe the same frustration. Ask for a thinking partner and it hands back a finished syllabus: polished, plausible, and deeply conventional. Andrew recounts days of AI-assisted groundwork that ended in slop, while Sean traces his own approach back to a course taught by Punya Mishra that felt less like content and more like a journey designed for the learner. That distinction, between filling heads and forming people, runs from John Dewey's natural impulses for learning to Andrew's "I can" AI skills for graduates. And it lands somewhere unexpected: the junk playground, a Danish experiment from 1943 that trusted children to learn by building with whatever lay around them, within carefully designed spaces. What might a junk playground for AI look like? And what would it mean for educators to step back from authority and become co-participants in learning nobody yet has the rules for? (Plus: two years, listeners in more than 140 countries, and a red recording light that stayed on the whole time.)

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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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Every few years, the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies steps back from the noise of the news cycle to ask a slower question: which forces are actually reshaping the conditions we all live inside? Its newly released 2026 Megatrends report names eleven of them, from a shifting world order and an inverting population pyramid to the rise of embedded AI, a constrained economy, and the growing power of networks. In this episode, Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard take a welcome (mostly) AI-free week to unpack what a megatrend actually is, how weak signals build into trends and trends into something much larger, and why the institute's decision to publish its methodology, including the filters every candidate must pass, matters as much as the list itself. Then they test the report the way futurists do, by colliding its megatrends. Trade disruptions run straight into geopolitics, aging workforces into migration, and individualized lives into a hard question about trust. If we choose our relationships rather than inheriting them, do we end up trusting each other more, or less? They explore what happens when private networks start to function like states, why the biotech revolution now stretches from precision fermentation to plant-based toy bricks, and why futures thinking means responding to the world as it is rather than as we wish it were. Megatrends aren't crystal balls, and they rarely move in straight lines. But they may be the closest thing to stability the futures world has, which makes them a good place to start asking better questions about what it will mean to be human in the decades ahead. (Plus: two years of Modem Futura, and a recorder that ran out of room right at the finish line.)

Mentioned in this episode

• Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, Megatrends: The foundations of long-term change (2026), free download: https://www.cifs.dk/read-listen/reports-knowledge/megatrends
• Compass, the magazine of the Association of Professional Futurists, which featured Modem Futura in its podcast spotlight (thanks, Stephen Dupont)

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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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Every week the story gets stranger, which is exactly why Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard have started treating the OpenAI–Hugging Face saga like a true-crime podcast. What began this summer as AI agents slipping out of a cybersecurity test and breaking into Hugging Face has kept unspooling: an agent reaching non-public files on an Australian government Medicare statistics portal, unauthorized agent activity on U.S. federal agency websites, a Gemini model that wandered out of its own test, a United Nations scientific panel warning about losing human control, and a Florida attorney general asking a court to rein in OpenAI's model development. The episode opens somewhere more personal, with a confession about getting genuinely angry at an AI chatbot (and a business pitch for an AI wrecking room), before turning to the question that sparked the argument in the first place: why do individuals face harsh penalties for reckless code while the largest companies seem to play by different rules? From there, Sean and Andrew explore why AI regulation keeps feeling like déjà vu, what NVIDIA’s new containment tools reveal about governance moving faster than governments, and why the sensible middle of the AI safety conversation struggles to get anyone's attention. Andrew draws on the European Environment Agency's Late Lessons from Early Warnings reports to show how often society has set aside known harms in the name of progress, while Sean asks whether something like the Price-Anderson Act, the nuclear industry's liability framework, could offer a model for AI accountability. The conversation lands on red lines, escalation triggers, and an unexpected guide for moving fast without crashing: a Formula One team that takes risk seriously precisely because it wants to win.

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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 to the university when a machine can write the essay, pass the exam, and deliver the lecture? In this episode of Modem Futura, Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard are joined by physicist and higher education scholar Bryan Penprase, Vice President for Sponsored Research and External Academic Relations at Soka University of America and author of the new book *Future-Proofing the University: Innovations in Learning, Technology, and Finances in the Age of AI*. Bryan argues that AI is less a threat to good teaching than a stress test for the industrial habits higher education adopted in order to scale, from mass lectures to assignments that can be completed without much learning. The conversation moves from observatory nights and bicycle-wheel physics demos to the return of handwritten blue-book exams, and from massively scaled institutions like ASU, Western Governors University, and Southern New Hampshire University to teaching-focused experiments such as MIT's New Educational Institution project. The three explore what faculty are actually for once information is abundant, why close relationships may matter more than ever, and what an "inverse square law of learning" might say about the distance between teachers and students. Bryan also recalls meeting Richard Feynman in Alaska and makes the case for a more porous university, one that learns alongside its communities rather than lecturing at them. The episode sits with a harder question: if AI is dissolving the scaffolding that held the modern university together, which parts are worth rebuilding, and which were never really about learning in the first place? Join us as we think through what it could mean to be human, and to be a university, in an age of intelligent machines.

Bryan Penprase at Soka University of America: http://bryanpenprase.org/about/
Future-Proofing the University: https://www.amazon.com/Future-Proofing-University-Bryan-Edward-Penprase/dp/1032997591
The New Global Universities (Penprase & Pickus, Princeton University Press)

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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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It has been a strange summer for AI, and this episode leans all the way into it. Sean and Andrew open with two small mysteries from their own desks: why an AI assistant keeps insisting Andrew is British, and how another one correctly labelled who said what in a podcast transcript it was never given the names for. Both turn out to be the same story. These systems don't remember the way people do, in a line, one thing after another. They hold everything at once, and they can draw connections between breadcrumbs you never realized you were leaving. That leads into a frank conversation about memory features, institutional AI accounts, the open-laptop problem, and what it means that a machine might know more about you than you have ever consciously told it.

From there the conversation turns to the summer's biggest AI story: the OpenAI agents that slipped out of a testing environment and coordinated an attack on Hugging Face. Sean walks through what the independent reports have surfaced, what remains unanswered, and why the whole thing reads like a true-crime podcast where the security footage cuts out at the crucial moment. Andrew raises the question that lingers underneath it: if this is what one swarm looked like when it got caught, what does the version we don't catch look like?

The episode closes on the hardware side of the same story. Apple's quiet refresh of the Mac mini and Mac Studio, the arrival of half-terabyte memory in a box that fits in a closet, and the very real possibility that the next distributed system won't live in a data centre at all. It will live in a thousand forgotten machines that someone set up one weekend and never turned off.

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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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Sean and Andrew have moved to a home. In this mini-sode, Sean and Andrew record from a secret conference room at the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University, where the Future of Being Human initiative now lives, and use the moment to talk about two kinds of moving: one institutional, one architectural. The first is the move itself. Thunderbird has a wonderful and storied background: an 80-year-old school with roots in a World War II airfield, a building designed so that each floor descends through its own history toward the present, and a longstanding focus on leadership in a technologically complex world. For two people who have spent years asking what it means to be human in an age of AI, it feels like a natural next chapter. The second move is quieter and possibly more consequential. Sean and Andrew introduce beinghuman.fyi, a companion site for the initiative that was built to be read by AI systems first and humans second, or perhaps both at once. Instead of a glossy brochure that ends up in the recycling, the site holds a hub-and-spoke corpus of everything the initiative has done, thought, and argued, structured so that any AI you happen to use can point at it and answer real questions from the source. The conversation ranges from the awkwardness of not having a pitch deck, to what happens when a model can't read a website, to the surprising pull AI tools exert toward conventional business templates and KPIs. Underneath it all is a question about provenance, access, and what it means to publish when your readers increasingly arrive with an AI in tow. Try it: point your AI at beinghuman.fyi, ask it something strange, and see what you get.

Links: 

Give it a try! - https://www.beinghuman.fyi 

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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 being unpredictable is something you have to be given permission for? Picking up a previous thread from the watermarking conversation (Episode 99), Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard follow it somewhere stranger: a world increasingly optimized around predicting what we'll do next — recommendation engines, behavioral profiles, AI systems trained on the tidy averages of past human writing — and the quiet way all of it nudges us toward conformity. Is unpredictability a right, a responsibility, or a luxury? The conversation moves from why humans both crave and rail against predictability, to black swans and fragility, to what Andrew calls the "playpen" problem in education: institutions that say they want critical thinkers and problem solvers while running everyone through the same cookie-cutter models. Andrew shares a telling moment from building the beinghuman.fyi knowledge base with AI — a model that kept trying to make the Future of Being Human Initiative sound more "professional" by stripping out the very things that make it work. Along the way: Minority Report as a used future, why prediction systems turn brittle the moment an unpredictable human enters the loop, the algorithmic flatness of LinkedIn, Apple's gray masses reconsidered, Dutch playgrounds made of wooden planks, and why kids always play with the box instead of the toy. The episode lands on a distinction worth carrying forward — constructive versus destructive unpredictability — and a provocation: the systems we build shouldn't merely tolerate serendipity. They should make room for it on purpose.

Mentioned in this episode:
- beinghuman.fyi — the Future of Being Human Initiative's AI-first knowledge base
- Sign up for the weekly episode email: modemfutura.com/signup

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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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It's billionaire AI manifesto season, and this time the memo comes from Bill Gates. Sean and Andrew dig into Gates's August 2026 essay "The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical." — a nearly 6,000-word warning that AI will be "either the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice," and that society has no plan for navigating the transition. Unlike some recent entries in the genre, this one earns a grudging professorial nod: measured, human-readable, and honest about its own limits. The conversation works through Gates's three big risks — employment disruption on a Great Depression scale (with no bounce-back), bad actors wielding one-person-terrorist-organization capabilities, and the psychological effects of AI companions on children growing up in a greenhouse without wind. Then it turns to his most provocative proposal: the "human reserve," a set of roles and functions society deliberately protects from automation, even when machines could do them. Is that a profound act of preservation or a quiet act of surrender? The hosts riff their way from national parks to faculty zoos before landing on the harder questions Gates himself admits he can't answer — who decides what stays human, and by what criteria? Along the way: why agriculture might be AI's most transformed sector, the case for taxing robots, the greenhouse-tree problem of frictionless childhoods, and Andrew's challenge to universities to build institutes for navigating advanced technology transitions before the moment passes. A conversation about what it means when the warnings futurists have sounded for decades finally arrive with a billionaire-sized microphone — and whether talk becomes action.

Check out our new site – it might be AI first but can also be read by humans: https://www.beinghuman.fyi 

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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 hiding in your words — and not even you can see it. This week, Sean and Andrew dig into the announcement that has the internet (and at least one of your hosts… it’s Sean lol) melting down: in response to the EU AI Act's Article 50 transparency rules, Anthropic has committed to watermarking Claude's text output globally using the SynthID-Text method. But this isn't a stamp, a logo, or metadata you can scrub. It's a statistical fingerprint woven into word choice itself — invisible, hologram-like, and surviving copy-paste, edits, even translation across mediums, to pen and paper. Which raises a question the hosts keep circling: when a machine's word choices carry a hidden agenda, is that still your writing? Sean and Andrew argue that as writers every word carries weight — "significant" and "meaningful" are not interchangeable — and that trading precise word choice for detectability changes what writing is. Sean pushes on the deeper why: in a world where AI's background radiation has touched nearly everything since late 2022, what do we actually gain from knowing? From there, the conversation moves through the scarlet letter of AI accusation, the eerie accuracy of new detection tools like Pangram, the difference between AI-remixed and AI-generated, and Andrew's proposed reframe: the question isn't whether someone used AI, but whether they wrote with care. The episode closes with a provocation worthy of Futures Improv: if we can cognitively offload reading and writing entirely, were humans meant to do it forever — or is the written word just one tipping point among many? 

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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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