Modem Futura

Ethan Mollick's new book, *Co-Existence: The Next Phase of AI*, starts from a premise that turns out to be anything but simple: AI isn't going away, so we had better learn how to live alongside systems that are sometimes, but not always, better than we are. In this episode, Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard review the book in the most Modem Futura way possible, with a genuine disagreement at the center. Andrew makes the case that accessibility is the point, and that a short, warm, openly uncertain guide may do more for people on the edges of the AI conversation than any comprehensive tome nobody finishes. Sean keeps running into the realization that he simply isn't the audience, as the book island-hops across ideas that each deserve a deeper dive. Along the way they explore the jagged frontier of AI capability, why our ability to evaluate AI output may be the very skill most at risk of eroding, Mollick's four human advantages of deep knowledge, wide knowledge, taste, and agency, and the idea that a job is a bundle of tasks rather than a single thing a machine can take. The conversation widens into authorship and influence (can anyone still say a book wasn't shaped by AI?), the odd intimacy of published conversations with Claude, and whether students might learn more from this book than from most AI literacy courses. Then comes the question neither host can settle: what is a book for when fewer people read, and when AI may be an author's most attentive reader?
Co-Existence by Ethan Mollick - [publishers website]


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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 Tesla's redesigned Roadster crawled up an inverted ramp, clung there upside down, and then flipped itself back onto its wheels on bursts of compressed air, it invited two very different reactions: awe at the engineering, and an eye-roll at the spectacle. In this episode of Modem Futura, Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard try to hold both at once. They unpack what was actually shown at the October reveal (cold-gas thrusters developed with SpaceX, an underbody fan system that lets the car quite literally suck itself to a surface, and a claimed 0.81-second sprint to 60 mph) and why so much of it reads less like a product than the most lavishly funded science fair project imaginable. From there, the conversation turns to something bigger than cars: what happens to imagination when we only allow it inside the lines? Sean shares the story of a high school mousetrap car that became a model-rocket-powered missile, and earned a D for its trouble. The hosts explore the difference between a playpen and a playground, why "serious play" may be a contradiction in terms, and how the language of innovation so often asks for the outputs of play without permitting the process. They also wrestle with a harder question: how do you celebrate genuinely playful engineering when it is fronted by someone with outsized wealth and influence? Along the way: futurist Jim Dator's reminder that any useful idea about the future should appear ridiculous, the flying car as one of our most persistent borrowed futures, fan-car physics, the spinoff argument for wild experiments. A conversation about spectacle, speed, and the permission to be ridiculous, and who gets to have 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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What happens when you ask a frontier AI model to do something a spreadsheet could finish in five minutes? Two years and 110 episodes into Modem Futura, Sean Leahy found out by asking AI to add up the show's total runtime. Twenty-five minutes, a small swarm of agents, and one offer to simply estimate the missing episodes later, the answer arrived, sending Andrew Maynard straight to Douglas Adams and the starship computer that seized up trying to make Arthur Dent a proper cup of tea. That detour sets up the heart of the episode: what AI can and can't do in designing a university course. Both hosts have leaned on AI as a kind of private instructional designer, and both describe the same frustration. Ask for a thinking partner and it hands back a finished syllabus: polished, plausible, and deeply conventional. Andrew recounts days of AI-assisted groundwork that ended in slop, while Sean traces his own approach back to a course taught by Punya Mishra that felt less like content and more like a journey designed for the learner. That distinction, between filling heads and forming people, runs from John Dewey's natural impulses for learning to Andrew's "I can" AI skills for graduates. And it lands somewhere unexpected: the junk playground, a Danish experiment from 1943 that trusted children to learn by building with whatever lay around them, within carefully designed spaces. What might a junk playground for AI look like? And what would it mean for educators to step back from authority and become co-participants in learning nobody yet has the rules for? (Plus: two years, listeners in more than 140 countries, and a red recording light that stayed on the whole time.)

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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 few years, the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies steps back from the noise of the news cycle to ask a slower question: which forces are actually reshaping the conditions we all live inside? Its newly released 2026 Megatrends report names eleven of them, from a shifting world order and an inverting population pyramid to the rise of embedded AI, a constrained economy, and the growing power of networks. In this episode, Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard take a welcome (mostly) AI-free week to unpack what a megatrend actually is, how weak signals build into trends and trends into something much larger, and why the institute's decision to publish its methodology, including the filters every candidate must pass, matters as much as the list itself. Then they test the report the way futurists do, by colliding its megatrends. Trade disruptions run straight into geopolitics, aging workforces into migration, and individualized lives into a hard question about trust. If we choose our relationships rather than inheriting them, do we end up trusting each other more, or less? They explore what happens when private networks start to function like states, why the biotech revolution now stretches from precision fermentation to plant-based toy bricks, and why futures thinking means responding to the world as it is rather than as we wish it were. Megatrends aren't crystal balls, and they rarely move in straight lines. But they may be the closest thing to stability the futures world has, which makes them a good place to start asking better questions about what it will mean to be human in the decades ahead. (Plus: two years of Modem Futura, and a recorder that ran out of room right at the finish line.)
Mentioned in this episode
Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, Megatrends: The foundations of long-term change (2026), free download: https://www.cifs.dk/read-listen/reports-knowledge/megatrends
Compass, the magazine of the Association of Professional Futurists, which featured Modem Futura in its podcast spotlight (thanks, Stephen Dupont)

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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 week the story gets stranger, which is exactly why Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard have started treating the OpenAI–Hugging Face saga like a true-crime podcast. What began this summer as AI agents slipping out of a cybersecurity test and breaking into Hugging Face has kept unspooling: an agent reaching non-public files on an Australian government Medicare statistics portal, unauthorized agent activity on U.S. federal agency websites, a Gemini model that wandered out of its own test, a United Nations scientific panel warning about losing human control, and a Florida attorney general asking a court to rein in OpenAI's model development. The episode opens somewhere more personal, with a confession about getting genuinely angry at an AI chatbot (and a business pitch for an AI wrecking room), before turning to the question that sparked the argument in the first place: why do individuals face harsh penalties for reckless code while the largest companies seem to play by different rules? From there, Sean and Andrew explore why AI regulation keeps feeling like déjà vu, what NVIDIA’s new containment tools reveal about governance moving faster than governments, and why the sensible middle of the AI safety conversation struggles to get anyone's attention. Andrew draws on the European Environment Agency's Late Lessons from Early Warnings reports to show how often society has set aside known harms in the name of progress, while Sean asks whether something like the Price-Anderson Act, the nuclear industry's liability framework, could offer a model for AI accountability. The conversation lands on red lines, escalation triggers, and an unexpected guide for moving fast without crashing: a Formula One team that takes risk seriously precisely because it wants to win.

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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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