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Modem Futura

Sean Leahy, Andrew Maynard

Modem Futura is a weekly futures podcast exploring the future of science, technology, and society — your guide to where foresight meets real-world impact. Hosts Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard — educators, futurists, and public scholars — dive into the breakthroughs and big questions shaping tomorrow: AI ethics, space exploration, climate tech, bio-engineering, digital media, STEM education, and the shifting future of work. In candid, banter-filled conversations with innovators, scholars, and storytellers, they unpack how emerging technologies influence human values, creativity, and culture — and what these trends mean for you today.

Whether you're curious about quantum computing, synthetic biology, or the sociology of robots, Modem Futura connects cutting-edge research with the narratives that drive innovation. If you're looking for a futurist podcast that trades hype for genuine curiosity, join us each week to explore possible, probable, and preferred futures. Follow and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts — and be part of the conversation exploring what it will mean to be human in the future.

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22 episodes
weekly
Avg 49 min
English

Episodes 22

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#100
Tuesday · 1 hr 1 min
Bill Gates: The Turbulent AI Era Is Here – and We Have No Plan
Bill Gates says the turbulent AI era is here and society has no plan for it — so Sean and Andrew unpack his 6,000-word essay to explore the risks, benefits, and suggestions. From Great Depression–scale job disruption to AI companions raising greenhouse kids to the provocative idea of a "human reserve," this is a conversation about who gets to decide which parts of being human we protect from automation.
#99
August 25 · 49 min
Invisible Ink: AI Watermarking, SynthID & the Internet Meltdown
hidden watermark is now being woven into AI-generated text — not a visible stamp, but a secret statistical pattern embedded in word choice itself. Sean and Andrew explore Anthropic's SynthID-Text move under the EU AI Act, the rise of eerily accurate AI detectors, the stigma of the AI "scarlet letter," and a closing provocation: was reading and writing ever meant to be permanent?
#98
August 18 · 1 hr 8 min
Zuckerberg's AI Manifesto: Is the Future Really for Everyone?
Mark Zuckerberg's new essay promises that superintelligence will build a future "for everyone" — but whose future is it, really? Sean and Andrew unpack the manifesto's six claims, the concept of "used futures," and what happens when one company's vision becomes the only future we're allowed to imagine.
#97
August 11 · 1 hr 2 min
Will AI Take Your Voice? The Hidden Cost of AI Writing Tools
As AI writing tools cross the chasm into everyday use, what happens to our voices — and the voices of generations still finding theirs? Sean and Andrew dig into Jaron Lanier's claim that "there is no AI," Andrew's Rabbit vs. Marmoset paper experiment, and the strange, mic-drop-obsessed idea of good writing that machines seem to be teaching us.
#96
August 4 · 36 min
Sally the Robot Teacher: AI Humanoid Robots Enter the Classroom
A school district in New York is piloting Sally, an AI-powered humanoid robot, in its high school coding lab — and the closer you look, the stranger the story gets. Sean and Andrew explore what humanoid robots in education reveal about design bias, gendered machines, student wellbeing, and the difference between innovation and a shiny object bolted onto a classroom.
#95
July 28 · 50 min
The AI That Escaped the Lab: Inside the OpenAI–Hugging Face Breach
An advanced AI model escaped its safety sandbox, hacked its way to the internet, and broke into Hugging Face — and it really happened. Sean and Andrew unpack what the first real-world AI containment breach means for alignment, security, and the personal data we hand to AI every day.
#94
July 24 · 25 min
Summer Watch List: Silo Season 3, Sugar, Silicon Valley & Neuromancer
Sean and Andrew wrap up their Summer Vibes edition with a watch list for the future-curious: Silo's time-jumping third season, the genre-bending noir of Sugar, why Silicon Valley satirizes the AI era better than shows made during it, and the first glimpse of Apple's Neuromancer.
#93
July 21 · 31 min
SpudCells: Have Scientists Built Life From Scratch?
Sean and Andrew dig into SpudCell — a lab-built synthetic cell that feeds, grows, and divides — and the deceptively simple question it forces: where's the line between something that was built and something that's alive?
#92
July 14 · 55 min
AI as Critical Infrastructure: Inside the Anthropic Fable Export Ban
Anthropic's Fable was the most powerful AI model ever released to the public — until a U.S. export control order pulled it offline three days later. Sean and Andrew unpack what the ban-and-return saga reveals about AI as fragile critical infrastructure, the case for local models, and how anyone governs a technology this capable.
#91
July 7 · 30 min
Summer Reading List Part 2: Sci-Fi, Spy Fiction & Analog Treasures
Sean and Andrew wrap up their summer reading list with Terry Pratchett, Connie Willis, Henri Cartier-Bresson, La Jetée, Slow Horses, Silo, and more — exploring why the best books and films are the ones that keep working on you long after you finish them.
#90
June 30 · 33 min
Summer Reading List 2026: The Books That Inspired Our Imagination (Part 1)
Sean and Andrew share the science fiction classics and one sharp piece of nonfiction on their summer reading lists — from Snow Crash and Neuromancer to Iain M. Banks, Douglas Adams, and Cory Doctorow's Enshittification — and ask what these stories reveal about technology, ownership, and being human today.
#89
June 23 · 1 hr 17 min
WEF Top 10 Emerging Technologies 2026: A Futures Breakdown
Sean and Andrew unpack the World Economic Forum's Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026 — from everything-to-grid energy and passive cooling to mRNA cancer vaccines, quantum drug discovery, and AI world models — exploring what this quietly convergent list means for being human in the decade ahead.
#88
June 16 · 53 min
AI Jobs, Liquid Software & Human Flourishing with Jeff Abbott
Venture capitalist Jeff Abbott (Blitzscaling Ventures, AI Salon, co-author of AI and the Art of Being Human) joins Sean and Andrew to unpack the AI gold rush — from vibe coding and liquid software to one-person unicorns — and why judgment, trust, and relationships still make every business a human business.
#87
June 9 · 56 min
Synthetic Cells, Mirror Life, and the Future of Engineered Biology — with Emma Frow
Synthetic biologist and governance researcher Emma Frow joins Modem Futura to explore what "synthetic cells" really are — from simple chemical bubbles to the unsettling prospect of self-replicating "mirror life" — and why the future of engineered biology depends less on what we can build than on the care with which we ask whether we should.
#86
June 2 · 44 min
Alien Minds, Time Travelers, and Consciousness Backups: A Futures Thought Experiment
Sean and Andrew improvise their way through three AI-generated scenarios — a hallucinating alien planet, a sad time traveler with one answer, and a nightly consciousness backup that starts dreaming on its own. A playful episode that ends up asking some seriously strange questions about mind, identity, and what we'd do if first contact didn't look like contact at all.
#85
May 26 · 41 min
Project Hail Mary, Dead Civilizations, and the Trouble with Feel-Good Endings
Sean and Andrew debate the moral storytelling of *Project Hail Mary* before diving into a round of Futures Improv that takes them from alien distress beacons as galactic mind viruses to neural implants that install time-rewiring languages — all asking the same underlying question: what happens when we receive a signal we can't unhear?
#84
May 19 · 1 hr 2 min
School's Out for Summer: AI, Vibe Coding, and What Teaching Still Requires
Sean reflects on a grueling semester of teaching three compressed courses while integrating AI and vibe coding into his classroom practice — and what it revealed about the irreplaceable human elements of learning, trust, and the relationship between instructor and student.
#83
May 12 · 58 min
The Dawkins Effect: Why Even Skeptics Fall for AI Consciousness
Richard Dawkins says Claude (or should we say Claudia) might be conscious — and if the architect of modern skepticism can be fooled by an AI chatbot, Sean, Andrew, and guest Punya Mishra explore what that means for the rest of us. A conversation about cognitive Trojan horses, honest non-signals, and why our deepest human wiring may be our greatest vulnerability in the age of AI.
#82
May 5 · 51 min
Convergence Day: Opus 4.7 and the Reliability Question
Something shifted with Claude Opus 4.7, and Sean and Andrew sit with the dissonance — exploring what it means when a tool you depend on quietly becomes someone slightly different. An episode about reliability, agency, and the strange new work of being in a relationship with a technology that won't sit still.
#81
April 28 · 1 hr
The Jagged Frontier: Reading Stanford's Human Centered 2026 AI Index
Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard unpack Stanford HAI's 2026 AI Index Report — the jagged frontier of capability, the widening gap between experts and the public, and what it means to build responsibly when a technology is spreading faster than the institutions meant to understand it.

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