Archive - The Future of Being Human

Five things we need to know about technological change

This week's episode of Modem Futura revisits Neil Postman's influential 1998 talk about understanding and navigating transformative technologies

Mar 11 •

The "hard" concept of care in technology innovation

Does a lack of care in how we develop and use new technologies risk turning us and our creations into "monsters?"

Mar 9 •

Photography in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

This week's episode of Modem Futura explores the changing relationship between photographer and photograph as AI transforms the art of image making

Mar 4 •

AI and the lure of permissionless innovation

What could possibly go wrong as we prize the guardrails of responsibility off artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies?

Mar 2 •

February 2025

This is NOT a podcast about AI

This week on Modem Futura Sean and I try desperately hard not to talk about AI, and end up chatting about tech, story telling, sci-fi, and the art of…

Feb 25 •

An AI model that can decode and design living organisms

The Arc Institute's new EVO 2 model does for DNA what ChatGPT did for words

Feb 23 •

AI: The Medium is the "Massage?"

Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message, and other highlights from this week's episode of Modem Futura

Feb 18 •

The Artisanal Intellectual in the Age of AI

How is advanced artificial intelligence forcing a rethink of the value of human intellectual labor?

Feb 16 •

AI humility, artisanal intellectuals, and Reid Hoffman's Superagency

Some of the highlights in this week's episode of Modem Futura

Feb 11 •

Can AI write your PhD dissertation for you?

I spent four days trying to get OpenAI's new tool Deep Research to research and write a complete dissertation. This is what I discovered.

Feb 9 •

Does OpenAI's Deep Research signal the end of human-only scholarship?

Having got my hands on Sam Altman's latest AI offering yesterday, I'm beginning to wonder when research and scholarship that isn't augmented by AI will…

Feb 4 •

AI turned my class into a song — and I can’t stop listening

One of my student used ChatGPT and Suno to create a musical ode to my Pizza and a Slice of Future class, and it’s awesome!

Feb 2 •

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