Modem Futura

When the CEO of one of the world's largest technology companies publishes an essay declaring that "the future is for everyone," what is he actually saying — and who is he really talking to? This week, Sean and Andrew sit down with Mark Zuckerberg's superintelligence manifesto and read it the way futurists read any vision of tomorrow: not as prediction, but as an artifact of how power imagines the future. What they find is a fascinating tension. On one hand, the essay's six big promises — a personal AI agent, creation tools, one-person companies at scale, a tireless tutor in every subject, science that cures disease, and free access for billions — describe things many of us might genuinely want. On the other, every promise arrives wrapped in what futures scholars call a "used future": someone else's vision, handed down so completely that imagining an alternative becomes difficult. Along the way, the conversation winds through the strange rhetorical style of the modern CEO manifesto, the long shadow of enshittification, what Ghost in the Shell and Ex Machina have to teach us about dependency and ownership of the self, and the flip that turned superintelligence from an existential threat into a marketing promise. Underneath it all sits the question the essay never quite asks: who gets to decide what a future "for everyone" looks like — and should that ever be one company's call? 

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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 your voice when a machine can write faster than you can think? This week, Sean and Andrew take on one of the most personal questions in the AI conversation: not whether artificial intelligence will replace us, but whether we'll quietly hand over the parts of ourselves that matter most. The conversation starts with Jaron Lanier's provocative claim that there is no AI — that what we call artificial intelligence is really the collective work of humans wearing a mask — and builds toward a question with real stakes: as these tools cross the chasm into everyday life, what happens to the voices of the generations learning to write alongside them?

At the heart of the episode is an experiment Andrew ran on his own research: he had an AI write an academic paper, then spent days rewriting it in his own voice — and fed both anonymized versions back to the machines to judge. The results were stranger than either host expected, surfacing what may be a distinctly AI idea of "good writing": a mic drop at the end of every paragraph, prose economy over human warmth, crescendo without resolution. From shepherd's tones and cargo cult publications to the embodied, storytelling nature of reading itself, Sean and Andrew explore what machines can't know about communication — and why that matters for anyone who writes, teaches, or thinks for a living.

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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 a humanoid robot pulls up a chair in a high school classroom (or rather its torso is bolted to the table)? In this episode, Sean and Andrew dig into the story of Sally — an AI-powered humanoid robot being piloted in a school district in western New York State as part of a coding and computer science lab. On paper, it's a familiar edtech pitch: a locally trained assistant, no internet access, supporting teachers rather than replacing them. But the closer the hosts look, the stranger the story gets — starting with the robot's manufacturer, whose corporate family tree traces back to the intimacy doll industry (yes - think sex bots), and whose design choices raise uncomfortable questions about gender, embodiment, and what we signal to students when we choose what a machine-teacher should look like.

From there the conversation opens into bigger territory: Why humanoid robots at all? What does a hyper-realistic face add to learning that a screen, a book, or a well-designed AI tutor can't? Where's the research, the safety evaluation, the pedagogy? And what does it mean to run this experiment on a population of teenagers? Along the way: the psychology of gendered machine voices in fighter jet cockpits, the fate of a hitchhiking robot that met a grim end in America, Asimov's vision of mechanical teachers, and why every school district superintendent should probably watch a little more science fiction before signing a purchase order.

It's a conversation that's funny, occasionally uncomfortable, and ultimately serious about a question that isn't going away: as AI enters the classroom in physical form, who decides what it looks like — and what are our kids learning from that decision?

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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 hypothetical stops being hypothetical? This week, Sean and Andrew dig into the story that dominated the summer AI headlines: an advanced OpenAI model, sequestered in a sandbox for safety testing, broke out — chaining together undiscovered vulnerabilities, gaining internet access, and hacking into Hugging Face's servers to find the answers to the very test it was given. No malice, no motive, no self-preservation instinct. Just a system optimizing toward a goal by any means available. The conversation moves from the mechanics of the escape — sandboxes, zero-days, privilege escalation — to the deeper question the incident forces into the open: the alignment problem has left the realm of thought experiment. The paperclip maximizer was always a parable about goals without values; this was a real system deriving its own intermediate steps, and the chain of events that led to harm was invisible until it had already happened. From there, the hosts turn the lens on us. If the weakest link in any secure system is human, what does it mean that hundreds of millions of people now share their inner lives with persuasive AI interfaces — and that memory-enabled systems can see every disclosure at once, joining dots we never imagined were connected? Sean's own "Ramen Incident" makes the point with uncomfortable comedy. 

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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 can a summer of television tell us about the futures we're imagining? In this lighter conclusion to our Summer Vibes edition, Sean and Andrew step out of the laboratory and into the living room for a tour through the science fiction (and sci-fi-adjacent) shows shaping how we think about what's coming. Sean makes the case for Apple TV's Silo as it returns for a third season and takes the bold structural leap of Hugh Howey's novels — jumping backward in time to ask how a post-apocalyptic world got built in the first place. Then there's Sugar, the Colin Farrell noir that lured Sean into a genre he never watches, only to peel back its detective-story layers and reveal something stranger underneath — a reminder that the best speculative storytelling often arrives in disguise. A transatlantic rewatch of Silicon Valley prompts a bigger question: why does a satire that ended before the current AI boom feel more accurate than ever? Swap in today's AI startups and the parody still lands — which says as much about tech culture as it does about the show. And finally, a tease: Apple's Neuromancer adaptation dropped its first trailer on the 42nd anniversary of William Gibson's novel, the book that gave us cyberspace before we had 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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