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WEF Top 10 Emerging Technologies 2026: A Futures Breakdown
Episode 89
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 …
7 hours ago
AI Jobs, Liquid Software & Human Flourishing with Jeff Abbott
Episode 88
School's out, the studio's packed into boxes, and Modem Futura is officially on summer roadshow — broadcasting from Andrew's home studio with returni…
1 week ago
Synthetic Cells, Mirror Life, and the Future of Engineered Biology — with Emma Frow
Episode 87
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 a…
2 weeks ago
Alien Minds, Time Travelers, and Consciousness Backups: A Futures Thought Experiment
Episode 86
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 …
3 weeks ago
Project Hail Mary, Dead Civilizations, and the Trouble with Feel-Good Endings
Episode 85
A timed episode (they gave themselves 35 minutes — barely made it) becomes an excuse for two arguments stitched together. First, Sean and Andrew fina…
4 weeks ago
School's Out for Summer: AI, Vibe Coding, and What Teaching Still Requires
Episode 84
What happens when the semester ends and you finally have a moment to look back at what just happened? In this episode, Sean and Andrew sit down for a…
1 month ago
The Dawkins Effect: Why Even Skeptics Fall for AI Consciousness
Episode 83
When Richard Dawkins — the man who gave us The Selfish Gene and decades of rigorous scientific skepticism — published an essay declaring that Claude,…
1 month, 1 week ago
Convergence Day: Opus 4.7 and the Reliability Question
Episode 82
Something has changed with Claude — not catastrophically, not visibly, just enough that the writers, researchers, and builders who'd come to rely on …
1 month, 2 weeks ago
The Jagged Frontier: Reading Stanford's Human Centered 2026 AI Index
Episode 81
A system that can win gold at the International Mathematical Olympiad but can't read an analog clock. A technology being adopted faster than almost a…
1 month, 3 weeks ago
Mythos and the Sorcerer's Apprentice: When AI Outruns Our Wisdom
Episode 80
Anthropic's unreleased "Mythos" model surfaced thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities nobody had ever caught — some buried in trusted software for nea…
2 months ago