Modem Futura

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.

-----
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.
-----

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]

-----
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.
-----

In this episode of Modem Futura, Sean and Andrew explore Isaac Asimov's remarkably prescient 1951 short story "The Fun They Had," a brief, brilliant tale set in 2155 where two children discover a paper book—an artifact from a forgotten era—and begin questioning everything about their own AI-driven, hyper-personalized education. Written decades before the personal computer existed, Asimov imagined a world where mechanical tutors deliver individually tailored lessons in isolation, and where the very idea of a human teacher seems absurd. What makes this story so compelling today is how closely it mirrors the promises—and tensions—of our current moment. As AI-powered learning tools proliferate, the conversation turns to what personalized education might gain and what it risks losing: the shared experiences of a classroom, the inspiration of a human mentor, the messy, emotional, irreplaceable dynamics of learning alongside others. Sean and Andrew unpack the story's deeper questions about the purpose of education—is it about efficiency and skill transfer, or something more fundamentally human?—and connect them to John Dewey's enduring framework of inquiry, communication, construction, and expression. The episode also wanders into the surprising resurgence of analog technologies—vinyl records, film cameras, iPods—and asks why, in an era of infinite digital choice, so many people are reaching for the constraints and tactile pleasures of older media. From the permanence of the printed word to the paradox of too much choice on Spotify, this conversation is an invitation to sit with a question Asimov posed over seventy years ago: in our rush to optimize learning and life, what kind of fun might we be leaving behind?
Read the short story: The Fun They Had (Issac Asimov, 1951)

-----
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.
-----

Something unexpected is happening in the world of software: it's becoming personal again. In this episode of Modem Futura, Sean and Andrew explore the rapidly expanding phenomenon of vibe coding—the practice of describing what you want in plain language and letting a generative AI build it for you. What starts as a practical conversation about creating web apps and custom tools quickly opens into something much richer: a reflection on what it means when anyone, regardless of technical background, can conjure software into existence with a sentence or two. The hosts trace a surprising thread from the Commodore 64 and early BASIC programming of the late 1970s and 80s to today's AI-powered coding environments, finding echoes of that original thrill—the moment you realized you could make a machine do something it hadn't done before. Sean walks through real experiments he ran using Claude, including a horizon-scanning web app and a futures-oriented uncertainty matrix tool, both created from single natural-language prompts in seconds. But the conversation doesn't shy away from the tensions. What happens when code is generated faster than anyone can understand it? What are the security implications of prompt injection, inherited power, and AI agents running on your personal machine? And where is the line between liberating personal tool-making and professional-grade software that people's lives depend on? This episode is part celebration, part caution, and entirely an invitation to think about what software becomes when it's shaped not by engineers alone, but by anyone with a question and a good description of what they need.
Get the book: AI and the Art of Being Human (Pocket edition) [Amazon US]

-----
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.
-----

What do kids actually think about the future they're inheriting? In this special episode, Sean and Andrew are joined by an unexpected guest: Freddie Leahy, Sean's almost-10-year-old son and aspiring paleontologist. What unfolds is a surprisingly nuanced conversation about artificial intelligence, creativity, and what it means to do meaningful work.
Freddie arrives with a question that might surprise some adults: Will AI take the job he wants? His dream of becoming a paleontologist—inspired by Jurassic Park's Alan Grant—isn't just about dinosaurs. It's about digging in the dirt, feeling fossils in his hands, doing the work himself. When Andrew suggests AI could help find more bones faster, Freddie pauses. He doesn't want to just control an AI that does the digging. He wants to be the one who discovers.
The conversation winds through familiar Modem Futura territory—AI image generation, the limits of large language models, the temptation to shortcut creative work—but seen through fresh eyes. Freddie has made AI art with his dad, but he notices something: "It never meets what you want." He wants to write his own stories, not have them generated. When offered the prospect of an AI friend who shares all his interests, he's suspicious: "That would be weird because nobody likes what I like."
Perhaps the most striking moment comes during Futures Improv, when asked about mind uploading. His answer is immediate: "I refuse." Why? Because at nine years old, why would you give up a body that still works?
This episode isn't about what adults think kids should know about technology. It's an invitation to listen to what the future already thinks about itself.

-----
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.
-----