Modem Futura

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 with teeth, the kind of reading that takes you somewhere strange and quietly rewires how you see the world you came back to. The conversation moves through the cyberpunk bedrock of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and William Gibson's Neuromancer — books that imagined the metaverse and cyberspace decades before Silicon Valley borrowed the vocabulary and, the hosts argue, missed the satire. It winds through Iain M. Banks and the moral vertigo of Surface Detail, where civilizations build virtual heavens and, inevitably, virtual hells, and the gentler doorway of The Player of Games. It lingers on Douglas Adams, whose original radio scripts Andrew counts among his prized possessions and whose wit, he insists, anticipated our anxieties about AI with personality long before the chatbots arrived. And it lands on Cory Doctorow's Enshittification, a nonfiction reckoning with why the once-glorious internet curdled — and what it means that a physical book printed in 1980 still opens and reads without a license, an update, or permission. A recurring tension runs underneath it all: in an age of cognitive technologies and editable digital pasts, what do we actually own, and what owns us? Part 2 arrives next week. Until then, keep imagining the future.

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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 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 and your house into a living power network, direct lithium extraction, passive radiative cooling materials that could make a Phoenix summer survivable without melting the grid. Then the conversation turns intimate and biological: PFAS destruction for the forever chemicals we were too clever at making, precision fermentation brewing protein and medicine in microscopic vats, exosome drug delivery and personalized mRNA cancer vaccines that turn a tumor's own signature against it. And running underneath it all, the compute layer — quantum simulation mapping "undruggable" diseases atom by atom, AI world models that learn the physical world the way a one-year-old does, and lattice-based cryptography hardening our secrets against quantum computers that don't yet exist. What makes this list interesting isn't novelty; it's the quiet convergence. Stack these together and you start to glimpse a tricorder-and-replicator future — scan, model, ferment, deliver — alongside harder questions about accountability, unintended consequences, and who gets to be the architect of the world the machines come to understand. A wide-ranging, warm, and genuinely curious tour through the technologies that may shape the next decade.

Full WEF Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026 [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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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 mirror so much of what we do? — has only grown louder, from boardrooms to commencement ceremonies where graduates are now booing the mention of AI. Sean, Andrew, and Jeff sit with that tension: a generation feeling like AI is happening to them, alongside builders doing things that seemed impossible three years ago. From inside the venture world, Jeff offers a candid tour of the new gold rush — why there are almost no technical moats left, what happens when the model beneath your startup shifts overnight, and why software itself is going liquid, spun up for a single task and discarded. Along the way: the plumber who no longer needs an office manager, the rise of the one-person unicorn, the minimum viable human team, and a question Jeff turns back on his hosts — what would an investment framework for human flourishing actually look like? Beneath the vibe coding and the venture math sits a stubbornly human truth the trio keeps circling back to: judgment, trust, and relationships remain the parts of the iceberg AI can't reach. Every business, it turns out, is still a human business.

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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 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 responsible innovation of synthetic cells, and as she tells it, the group spent its first six months simply trying to agree on what a synthetic cell is. It turns out there's no consensus — the term stretches from a humble bag of enzymes wrapped in a lipid membrane all the way to fully constructed, self-replicating organisms. From there the conversation moves into deeper water: What counts as living? Where does a cell end and a bundle of chemicals begin? And who, exactly, decides whether a new creation belongs to the world of chemical safety or biological oversight? The trio also takes on the unsettling idea of "mirror life" — organisms built from the opposite molecular handedness of everything that has ever lived — and the recent scientific reckoning over whether some doors are better left unopened. What emerges isn't fear, exactly, but a case for care: the recognition that biotechnology can't move at Silicon Valley speed, that containment is never perfect, and that the questions we ask matter as much as the things we build. It's a conversation about handedness and humility, about plasmids and power, and about why the slow, friction-filled work of asking "should we?" might be the most human technology of all.

Emma's ASU Bio - [web]

Read the Report: Supporting Responsible Innovation of Synthetic Cells: Biosafety, Biosecurity, and Environmental Considerations
2026 [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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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 moon-sized organism that communicates only by generating vivid hallucinations drawn from our own repressed memories. It isn't hostile. It isn't friendly. It may not even know we exist as separate beings. That sends us into the hard problem of consciousness, the limits of recognizing a mind that doesn't look like ours, and the slightly humbling observation that we still can't have a proper conversation with an octopus.

Then The Wells Reset: a time traveler arrives from the year 8,002,701 with one verified fact — humanity survived — and one question they're willing to answer before returning. They look sad. What do you ask? And, just as importantly, what do you choose not to ask?

We close with The Backup's Dilemma: every night while you sleep, your consciousness is copied to the cloud. Ten years in, the backups start dreaming differently than you do. Who, then, has the right to your marriage, your grudges, your name? And the question that always sneaks up behind it — how would you know you weren't already the backup?

Plus a wildcard run at first contact via TikTok, because of course.

A loose, playful episode that ends up somewhere genuinely strange. Bring your favorite metaphysical anxiety.

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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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