Modem Futura

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.

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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 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.

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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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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?

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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 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.

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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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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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