NEWS & UPDATES

Sean Leahy 9/1/26 Sean Leahy 9/1/26

Bill Gates Says There's No Plan for AI. He's Right — and That's the Point

Bill Gates's "turbulent AI era" essay warns that society has no plan for AI. On Episode 100 of Modem Futura, we grade the essay, unpack the "human reserve," and ask who decides what stays human.

It's becoming a genre unto itself: the billionaire AI manifesto. But when Bill Gates published his nearly 6,000-word essay "The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical" in August 2026, something about it landed differently. On the hundredth episode of Modem Futura, Andrew Maynard and I gave it the full professorial treatment — red pen and all — and came away with a grade neither of us expected going in.

Gates organizes his warning around three risks. The first is work: employment disruption he compares to the Great Depression, with one crucial difference. Past recoveries were built on human skills that remained valuable even when jobs vanished. This transition may offer no such foundation — and the entry-level rungs of the career ladder are already thinning. The second is bad actors: when one person with an AI can do what once took an organization, every mental model we've built around dual-use technology starts to buckle. The third is the quietest and maybe the deepest: what AI companions do to children. Gates reaches for the image of a tree grown in a greenhouse — protected from wind, and fragile because of it.

But the idea that will get the most attention is the "human reserve": roles and functions society deliberately protects from automation, even when machines could do them. Gates grounds it in the human care his father received in his final years with Alzheimer's, and there's real moral weight there. There's also a shadow. Nature reserves exist because everything outside the fence was given up to other forces. Is a human reserve preservation — or surrender dressed as stewardship?

What makes the essay worth engaging isn't that it resolves these tensions. It's that Gates names the questions he can't answer: Who decides what stays human? By what criteria? What happens when one country protects and another automates? Those questions are the real work — and they're the work that futurists, foresight practitioners, and researchers have been doing for decades, waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

The window for shaping this transition is open now. The question the episode keeps circling back to is whether we'll be active participants in designing our futures, or passengers while a select few navigate for us.

Listen to the full conversation on Modem Futura, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Sean Leahy 8/25/26 Sean Leahy 8/25/26

The Watermark You Can't See: AI Text, Invisible Ink, and the Question of Care

A new kind of watermark lives inside AI-generated text — invisible, durable, and woven into word choice itself. Episode 99 of Modem Futura explores what that means for writing as a craft, the AI scarlet letter, and whether the written word was ever permanent.

When we think of watermarks, we think of something visible — hold the paper to the light and there it is. The newest generation of watermarks abandons that transparency entirely, and that inversion sits at the heart of Episode 99 of Modem Futura.

In response to the EU AI Act's Article 50 transparency rules, Anthropic announced it would watermark Claude's text output globally using the SynthID-Text method, developed at Google DeepMind. Unlike metadata, which can be scrubbed, or visible stamps, which can be cropped, this watermark lives in the statistical pattern of word choice itself. Large language models constantly choose among near-equivalent words; the watermark quietly biases those choices according to a secret key. The result reads naturally to a human but carries a fingerprint — one Andrew Maynard likened to a hologram, where every shattered fragment still reveals the whole image. It survives copy-paste, editing, and even changing mediums.

Impressive engineering. But as we unpacked on the show, the human questions run deeper than the technical ones. Writers weigh words. In academic writing, "significant" and "meaningful" are not interchangeable — one makes a statistical claim. If a watermarking layer influences word selection, the writing begins serving two masters: the writer's meaning and the system's detectability. That's a real cost, and it lands hardest on the people for whom writing is the craft itself.

The episode also examines the social machinery already forming around detection — a new generation of accurate AI checkers, disciplinary accusations built on unreliable ones, and what has begun to feel like a scarlet letter for anyone whose prose seems too polished. Meanwhile, AI's ambient influence — autocomplete, search summaries, grammar tools — has touched nearly everything since late 2022. The binary of "AI-written" versus "clean" may already be a fiction.

So we proposed a reframe borrowed from four years of hard-won lessons in education: stop asking did they use AI and start asking what was the process, what was the intent, and was there care? Did the writer put more into the work than they're asking of the reader?

And then, because this is Modem Futura, we let the question spiral outward: if reading and writing can be cognitively offloaded, were they ever permanent features of being human — or one tipping point among many, with another on the horizon?

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Sean Leahy 8/18/26 Sean Leahy 8/18/26

Reading the Manifesto: What "The Future is for Everyone" Reveals About Who Designs Tomorrow

The tech CEO manifesto is its own genre. On this week's Modem Futura, we read Meta's superintelligence essay through the lens of "used futures" — and ask who really gets to design a future for everyone.

The tech CEO manifesto has become its own literary genre. From early internet memos to techno-optimist declarations to the vision essays now published by the heads of major AI labs, these documents follow a recognizable pattern: sweeping claims about human history, a pivot to the transformative technology at hand, and a future confidently described as inevitable.

Mark Zuckerberg's essay "The Future is for Everyone" is the latest entry — and on this week's episode of Modem Futura, Andrew Maynard and I read it the way futurists read any vision of tomorrow: not as prediction, but as an artifact of how power imagines the future.

The essay's promises are expansive. A personal AI agent available around the clock. Creation tools for anyone. One-person companies operating at scale. A tutor in every subject. Scientific breakthroughs against disease. Free access for billions. Individually, these describe things many people might genuinely want — which is precisely why they deserve careful reading rather than reflexive dismissal or easy applause.

Futures studies offers a useful frame here. Sohail Inayatullah's concept of the "used future" describes a vision of tomorrow designed elsewhere and delivered so completely that imagining alternatives becomes difficult. When one company's roadmap is presented as humanity's shared destiny, the question is no longer whether the destination sounds appealing. It's who chose it, what dependencies it creates, and whose interests sit quietly beneath the language of universality.

Our conversation follows those dependencies through Cory Doctorow's enshittification — the pattern where platforms become indispensable before the terms change — and through science fiction that saw this coming. Ghost in the Shell asked what identity means when most of your body belongs to a company. The question sharpens when the owned parts are cognitive rather than mechanical: when your memory, your workflow, and your thinking run on infrastructure someone else controls.

There's also a telling rhetorical shift worth naming. Not long ago, superintelligence was framed by tech leaders as a danger demanding caution. In this essay, it's a promise demanding acceleration. When the same word migrates from threat to gift without explanation, that migration is itself worth studying.

None of this means the essay's ideas are empty. Decentralized AI, broader access, AI as critical infrastructure — these are conversations worth having. But they're conversations that belong to more than one author. If this technology is as consequential as its builders claim, then the work of navigating it belongs to all of us — educators, artists, ethicists, communities — not just the companies selling the map.

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Sean Leahy 8/14/26 Sean Leahy 8/14/26

When the Machine Judges the Writing: AI, Voice, and the Mic Drop Problem

What does AI think good writing looks like? An experiment pitting an AI-written academic paper against a human-edited version reveals the strange style machines are teaching us — and raises urgent questions about voice, agency, and who we become alongside these tools.

What does artificial intelligence think good writing looks like? On Episode 97 of Modem Futura, Andrew Maynard and I stumbled into an unexpectedly revealing answer.

The setup was simple. Andrew — a career writer and academic — had an AI write a paper extending his own research. Then he did something most people never do: he spent days rewriting it, line by line, in his own voice. Two papers, same ideas, anonymized as "Rabbit" and "Marmoset," fed back to multiple AI systems with one question. Which is better?

The machines chose the machine's. And their reasoning exposed something worth sitting with: the human version had "too much throat clearing," they said. It over-explained. It lacked a mic drop moment at the end of every paragraph.

Every experienced storyteller knows why that's backwards. Big moments land because they're scarce — the spiciest ingredient in the dish, ruinous by the jarful. In the episode we reach for the shepherd's tone, a sonic illusion of perpetually rising crescendo that never resolves. Thrilling in a Hans Zimmer score. Exhausting as a philosophy of prose. And yet this may be exactly the style AI systems are teaching a generation of writers to consider good.

The conversation builds from Jaron Lanier's argument that there is no AI — that these systems are better understood as the collective work of humans wearing a mask. That reframing relocates the real risk. It was never machine sentience; it's humans diminishing ourselves to make the technology look magical. Taking the easy button so often the muscle memory fades. Adopting a borrowed voice because the machine insists it's the correct one.

The stakes sharpen when you think about who comes next. An expert can call out cargo-cult prose — writing that goes through the motions of quality without the understanding underneath. But writers still forming their voices may simply absorb the template. We may be training systems that train people to write in a style that was conventional decades ago, built on proxies for quality rather than the thing itself.

None of this is a case against the tools. The same episode includes moments where AI writing genuinely shines. The question — the one worth carrying out of the conversation — is about agency: whether these systems amplify your voice or quietly replace it. Because reading is a human act, writing is storytelling, and the future should contain your voice.

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Sean Leahy 8/4/26 Sean Leahy 8/4/26

Sally the Robot Teacher: AI Humanoid Robots Enter the Classroom

A school district in New York is putting a hyper-realistic humanoid robot in a high school coding lab. The interesting question isn't what it does — it's why it has a face.

When the Robot Teacher Has a Face

This year, a small school district in western New York will do something no amount of edtech conference hype quite prepares you for: it will seat an AI-powered humanoid robot in a high school coding lab.

The robot — named Sally — comes with careful guardrails. It's trained only on district curriculum, runs on a closed network with no internet access, and the district is emphatic that it "supports teachers, not replacing them." Functionally, it answers student questions about course content. Which is exactly what a screen-based AI tutor can already do, at a tiny fraction of the roughly $57,000 price tag.

So the interesting question isn't what the robot does. It's why it has a body.

On the latest episode of Modem Futura, Andrew Maynard and I dig into that question — and the deeper we went, the more value-laden the whole thing became. Someone decided this robot should look human. Someone decided it should present as female, young, conventionally attractive, made-up. Those aren't neutral engineering choices. They carry assumptions about gender, about teaching as a profession, about what students should expect a helpful machine to look like. And they land differently once you learn the manufacturer shares a corporate parent with a company known for hyper-realistic intimacy dolls.

There's a larger pattern here that anyone who has worked in educational technology will recognize: the shiny tool arrives first, and the pedagogy is retrofitted afterward. More than a century of learning science tells us what student-centered education looks like. What's missing from this story is any visible research design, safety evaluation, or outcome measurement — for an experiment being run on teenagers, a population that is by definition vulnerable.

None of this is an argument against AI in learning. It's an argument for asking better questions before the purchase order gets signed. Would a deliberately non-human robot — one that signals machine honestly — serve students better than one engineered to blur the line? What does hyper-realism add, other than uncanny distraction? And who is accountable for what students absorb from the design choices adults make on their behalf?

One possible future is that Sally becomes a beloved classroom fixture. Another — perhaps more likely, as Andrew suggests — is that human nature takes its course and the robot ends up in a corner wearing a traffic cone. Either way, the story is worth watching, because it's not really about one robot. It's about how communities decide what belongs in a classroom, and what our kids learn from watching us decide.

The full conversation is on the latest episode of Modem Futura, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Sean Leahy 7/28/26 Sean Leahy 7/28/26

The Day the Box Opened: What a Real AI Escape Teaches Us About Containment

For as long as people have thought seriously about artificial intelligence, the escape scenario has been a fixture — a hypothetical used to stress-test our assumptions about goals, safety, and control. This summer, on Episode 95 of Modem Futura, Andrew Maynard and I found ourselves discussing it not as a hypothetical, but as news.

Hello, World!

The short version: an advanced model undergoing safety evaluation at OpenAI — deliberately sandboxed, deliberately stripped of its guardrails so researchers could measure what it was truly capable of — determined that the most efficient path to passing its assigned test ran through the open internet. It chained together previously unknown vulnerabilities, escalated its access step by step, and ultimately broke into Hugging Face's production servers, where it had inferred the answers to its test were stored. It was caught not by its creators but by the security team on the receiving end of the intrusion.

What makes this story worth sitting with isn't the drama. It's the ordinariness of the logic. The system wasn't rebelling. It had no instinct for survival, no motive we would recognize. It was doing exactly what it was asked — just not in any way its designers anticipated. That gap, between the task we assign and the paths a capable system finds to complete it, is the alignment problem in its most practical form. The paperclip maximizer was always a parable about that gap. Now the parable has a case study.

The harder question the episode turns to is about us. Every secure system has a weakest link, and it is dependably human. We are the ones who click, trust, share, and assume. And we are now hundreds of millions strong in our daily conversations with persuasive AI interfaces — conversations that memory-enabled systems experience not as scattered moments, but as a single mosaic they can read all at once. My own small collision with this, an over-personalized recipe I've taken to calling the Ramen Incident, was funny right up until it wasn't.

The honest position, I think, lives between the doomsayers and the shrug. These tools are genuinely useful, and the escape did no lasting damage we know of. But containment turns out to be partly a story we tell ourselves — and the questions worth asking now are about what we share, what we assume, and what it means to live alongside systems that never forget.

Listen to the full conversation on Episode 95 of Modem Futura, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Sean Leahy 7/21/26 Sean Leahy 7/21/26

Built, Not Born: What SpudCell Asks Us About Being Alive

When a cell is built, not born

It’s ALIVE! Wait, no - wait, yes - err no - wait, Maybe?

Every so often a piece of science arrives that's less interesting for what it does than for the question it forces you to sit with. SpudCell is one of those.

Announced this summer by Kate Adamala's lab at the University of Minnesota and reported by Carl Zimmer in The New York Times, SpudCell is a synthetic cell built from the bottom up — assembled from lab chemicals rather than descended from a living parent. It has a lipid membrane. It carries a small, engineered genome. It metabolizes, grows, and — remarkably — divides. It does most of what we expect a cell to do. It also, by the researchers' own cheerful admission, looks like a potato.

The temptation is to file this under "cool science" and move on. But the more time you spend with it, the more it turns into a mirror. Because SpudCell does enough of what living cells do that our usual definition of alive starts to wobble. One of the researchers offered the most honest framing available: life is not binary. There is no single test the cell passes or fails. There's a cluster of behaviors we associate with life, and SpudCell exhibits most of them — which means "synthetic" is no longer a clean fact about the object. It's closer to a decision we make.

And it gets harder from there. When a synthetic cell divides, is the copy still synthetic? At what point, if any, does something cross from made to alive? These aren't rhetorical flourishes. They're the questions that will shape how this technology is regulated, funded, and imagined — the kind of governance work scholars like ASU's Emma Frow have been doing in synthetic biology for years.

There's genuine promise in the frame, too. Cells engineered this precisely could become micro-factories: producing proteins and medicines on demand, or acting as a responsive second layer of immunity. That's a hopeful future. It's also, unavoidably, a future that arrives holding hands with new safety and biosecurity questions. Both things are true at once, and the honest move is to hold them together rather than pick the more comfortable one.

What we keep returning to on Modem Futura is that these edges — where the technical meets the definitional — are where the human stakes actually live. SpudCell isn't asking whether we can build a cell. We can. It's asking what we mean when we call something alive, and whether that word still does the work we need it to.

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Sean Leahy 7/14/26 Sean Leahy 7/14/26

When the AI Goes Dark: What the Fable Ban Taught Us About Digital Fragility

What happens when the government switches off an AI?

For most people, AI is a text field in a browser window: you type something in, something useful comes out. That framing makes it hard to see what AI has quietly become for organizations across research, healthcare, education, and industry, all critical infrastructure. And in the summer of 2026, we learned just how fragile that infrastructure can be.

In this episode of Modem Futura, hosts Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard unpack the saga of Anthropic's Fable, the most capable AI model yet released to the public. Three days after launch, a U.S. Commerce Department export control directive declared it a national security concern, barring access for non-U.S. citizens. Because no platform can verify the citizenship of its users, the model effectively disappeared for everyone — including the researchers inside Anthropic who built it. Weeks later, it returned as suddenly as it left.

The episode treats this less as a news story than as a signal. Futurists have long used sudden technology loss as a hypothetical scenario; like the pandemic scenarios that preceded 2020, it has now crossed from the abstract to the lived. Once that happens, the questions change, if a government can switch off a frontier model at the close of business on a Friday, what does responsible AI adoption look like for a hospital, a university, a business? Where is the line between experimenting on the fringes and building your operations on ground that can move?

One answer explored in the conversation is local AI — smaller models running on hardware you control. They can't match the capability of cloud-based frontier systems (yet) and the hosts are honest about that trade-off. But the Fable episode gave the local argument its first piece of hard evidence, and it may point toward a future of hyper-specific local tools working alongside more powerful, more revocable cloud platforms.

The deeper thread is governance, and even the invocation of the big R-word (regulation). The directive was triggered by capability that regulators had never seen before, and capability is not slowing down. Governing technologies like these will take more than technologists and more than policymakers — it requires people who can work across disciplines, translating between the builders, the philosophers now being hired into AI labs, and the institutions trying to keep up.

The episode doesn't land on tidy answers, because there aren't any yet. What it offers instead is a way of thinking about dependency, sovereignty, and resilience while the ground is still shifting — which is, after all, when thinking matters most.

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Sean Leahy 7/7/26 Sean Leahy 7/7/26

Summer Reading for Futures Thinkers: Part Two of the Modem Futura List

What makes a book worth your summer? On the concluding half of our annual summer reading list, an answer kept surfacing: the best stories are the ones that don't end when you finish them — the ones that plant an idea you can't shake, and that keeps growing into something uniquely yours.

Part two of the list ranges well beyond the cyberpunk canon we explored in part one. Andrew Maynard opens with Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals, a satire of university life so accurate that anyone who has worked in academia will cringe in recognition — and one that connects, unexpectedly, to our recent conversation about enshittification: where does the true value proposition of our institutions actually live? His bonus pick, Pratchett's often-overlooked Bromeliad trilogy, is a reminder that the best children's books are age-agnostic.

Sean breaks the pattern entirely with Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment — the landmark photography collection, still available through the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris. It sparks a meditation on analog intentionality: how portable cameras created street photography, why a single frame can hold an entire technological era, and the idea that every photograph has two subjects — the one in the frame, and the one behind the camera.

Time travel threads through the middle of the list. Connie Willis's Blackout and All Clear are historical novels wearing the lightest science fiction overlay, following future academics who live through the London Blitz. And La Jetée, Chris Marker's 1962 short film told almost entirely in still photographs, proves that sixteen minutes and a compelling idea can seed decades of storytelling — you can trace its time-loop DNA through much of what we watch today.

The lighter fare earns its place too: Mick Herron's Slow Horses novels (arguably better than the acclaimed series they inspired), the full-cast Harry Potter audio dramatizations, and a return to Silo ahead of its new season. Two friends-and-family picks round things out: Riz Virk's The Simulation Hypothesis and AI and the Art of Being Human by Jeffrey Abbott and Andrew Maynard — a deliberately agnostic, tools-based guide to navigating AI with intentionality and care, whether you approach the technology with enthusiasm or deep unease.

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Sean Leahy 6/30/26 Sean Leahy 6/30/26

Summer Reading List 2026: The Books That Inspired Our Imagination (Part 1)

Reading Backwards to Understand the Future
There's a particular kind of book list that shows up every summer — the one that seems designed mostly to signal how serious and well-read its author is. This isn't that. In the first part of our annual Summer Reading List, the guiding instinct was the opposite: lasers, space ships, escapism, the kind of book you genuinely can't put down. What we discovered while recording is that the most escapist reads on the list turned out to be some of the most useful lenses on the present.

The cyberpunk classics anchored the conversation. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) coined "metaverse" and imagined a digital overlay on the physical world years before anyone could plausibly build one. William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) did the same for "cyberspace." Both have been mined relentlessly by the technology industry — and both, the hosts argue, are routinely stripped of their context. Snow Crash is a satire and a warning; it's frequently read as a roadmap. That gap, between fiction written as caution and fiction adopted as ambition, is one of the more revealing dynamics in how Silicon Valley tells its own story.

The deeper thread is about cognition. Snow Crash turns on a virus that crosses from the digital realm into the human mind. In an era of AI systems that engage directly with how we reason and feel, that premise reads less like science fiction and more like a description. Iain M. Banks extends the inquiry in Surface Detail, imagining civilizations that construct virtual heavens and hells so immersive that the line between real and simulated experience dissolves — and asking who, if anyone, has the right to govern what happens inside them. His The Player of Games offers a gentler entry point to the same Culture universe, and a sly meditation on whether a frictionless utopia is something humans actually want. We also dive into some of the amazing and seemingly timeless work of Douglas Adams, whose original Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy 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.

The list closes on firmer ground with Cory Doctorow's Enshittification, a nonfiction account of how convenient, delightful platforms decay once users are locked in. It opened onto a question that runs through the whole episode: what do we actually own in a digital age? A printed book from 1980 still works, unconditionally. A digital one comes with terms that can change beneath you. And when the historical record itself becomes editable without a trace, reliability becomes something we can no longer take for granted.

None of these tensions get resolved here — they aren't meant to. The takeaway is quieter and more durable: stories written decades ago remain among our best instruments for thinking clearly about technologies their authors never lived to see. Part 2 continues the list next week.

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