Future of Being Human an Arizona State University initiative

Fluid futures

Last updated 2026-08-13 · build 20260814T0314Z-83bb462d · Markdown version · corpus index

Most tools for thinking about the future quietly assume the ground will hold still while you think. Fluid futures — Sean Leahy’s framework, stated on his own site and developed jointly with Andrew Maynard on Modem Futura — starts from the opposite assumption: treat the future as a possibility space in constant motion rather than a set of destinations to choose among, and practice the kind of foresight that works midstream (Sean Leahy, 2026). The framework’s public statement came twice in one day — his post “Fluid Futures: Navigating an AI-Mediated World” (seanmleahy.com, 2026-03-31) and episode 77 of the podcast, “Fluid Futures: 10 Signals Reshaping an AI-Mediated World,” released the same day. Its core claim is aimed at tools: static frameworks — reports, institutions, skillsets — were built for stable environments and are inadequate in an AI-mediated world, where effective futures thinking means recognizing tensions rather than making predictions (2026-03-31). The distinction that does the analytical work inside the framework — augmentation versus mediation — has its own page, AI mediation vs. augmentation; this page carries the framework built around it. For an initiative whose founding question is what it means to be human in an age of transformative AI and other transformative technologies, fluid futures names the posture that question demands: if the space of possible futures will not sit still, the useful skill is reading it in motion.

The argument

The framework starts inside a tradition and pushes past it. Futures studies’ founding correction — the reason the field pluralizes its central noun — is that there is no single predetermined future; the discipline Sean teaches from holds possible, probable, and preferable futures open as a matter of method — a canon he names himself, Wendell Bell to Sohail Inayatullah (Foundations). Fluid futures accepts that and adds a further claim: the space of possible futures is itself in motion, continuously redrawn as technologies, cultures, institutions, environments, and human choices act on one another (Sean Leahy, 2026). A scenario set is a snapshot of an option space that does not wait for deliberation to finish; holding many futures in view is not enough if the field they sit in is treated as fixed.

What turned a long-standing instinct into a named framework was the condition his post names in its title: an AI-mediated world. The post’s target is static frameworks: reports, institutions, skillsets built for stable environments and, he argues, inadequate once AI is reshaping the system of information flows and decision options people operate inside (2026-03-31). That is the augmentation/mediation distinction at work — AI mediation vs. augmentation carries it in full — and it bears on foresight’s own machinery: prediction assumes a system that stays reasonably still between forecast and outcome; a mediated world is re-tuned in exactly that interval. Hence the post’s redefinition of the craft: effective futures thinking means recognizing tensions rather than making predictions (2026-03-31).

The fullest public working-out is joint. Episode 77, released the same day, runs the frame across the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies’ “Exploring the Futures of Technology 2.0” report — others’ work engaged openly, Andrew just back from its Denmark launch — and works through the report’s ten signals of the near future — CIFS’s framework, engaged on air, not the hosts’ own — from “the rise of liquid content on the web” and “agentic organizations running on armies of AI agents” to “quantum computing — the wildcard waiting at the edge of everything” (show notes, 2026-03-31). Read together, the signals are the fluidity claim given content: each names a place where the environment people plan inside is being rebuilt while they plan. The episode’s signature provocation — the risk of optimizing for a world that no longer exists — and the held question it closes on are quoted on the mediation page; episode 77 states them and, on its own account, does not resolve them (show notes, 2026-03-31).

What the framework asks for is a change in what foresight is for: the deliverable is not a sharper forecast or a better-chosen scenario but a capacity — staying curious, adaptive, imaginative, and agentic as conditions change (Sean Leahy, 2026). His own image for it is a river: the point is not to predict where the water comes out but to get good at reading the currents — knowing your own movements are part of what bends them (Sean Leahy, 2026). The last clause is the agency conviction the initiative holds from both principals: futures are made rather than found (Architects of the future is Andrew’s parallel thread).

None of this retires the field’s instruments — the same weeks, the hosts taught them. Episode 74 teaches Joseph Voros’s Futures Cone as an invitation to “move beyond the comfortable illusion that tomorrow will just be a slightly improved version of today” (show notes, 2026-03-10), with Sean’s companion post offering the cone as “a shared language for navigating” uncertainty, plus a stretch test: “If every idea your team generates sounds reasonable, you probably haven’t stretched far enough” (2026-03-10). Episode 78 pairs Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons with Jerome Glenn’s Futures Wheel — “structure without rigidity, and clarity without false certainty” (show notes, 2026-04-07) — and his companion post argues the pairing reveals “not just what a signal might do, but when and through which pathways it might do it” (2026-04-07). Under fluid conditions the tools’ job changes: they position rather than predict, their readings held provisionally, as maps of a moving field. The capacity is trainable — the premise of Sean’s foresight-studio teaching, aimed at reperception rather than coverage (Reperception), and of the catalyst role carrying the practice beyond classrooms (The Foresight Catalyst model).

Young in its named form — post and episode date to 2026-03-31 — the framing is held the way the initiative holds most of its ideas: a working frame, not doctrine (Philosophy). Sean’s account keeps the modesty of a shorthand: the concept took shape in his strategic-foresight practice and became explicit through the show’s running conversations about AI-mediated worlds — a name for what the practice was already doing (Sean Leahy, 2026). What the name adds is orientation. Prediction promises to tell you how the river ends. Fluid futures assumes it will not, and builds the reader of currents instead.

Lineage

In his own words

From Fluid Futures: Navigating an AI-Mediated World (Sean Leahy, seanmleahy.com, 2026-03-31), on cognitive offloading — the risk that delegating decisions to AI erodes the capacity to recognize when they are wrong:

“Like losing the ability to read a map. Except the stakes are considerably higher.”

From his Futures Cone post (seanmleahy.com, 2026-03-10), the stretch test he sets for imagination:

“If every idea your team generates sounds reasonable, you probably haven’t stretched far enough.”

From the show notes of Modem Futura episode 77, “Fluid Futures: 10 Signals Reshaping an AI-Mediated World” (Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard, 2026-03-31; episode mirror):

“From there, Sean and Andrew work through ten signals shaping the near future: the rise of liquid content on the web, agentic organizations running on armies of AI agents, neurotechnology merging with cognition, the growth of synthetic simulations, physical AI entering the real world, the weaponization of tech in geopolitics, the mounting fragility of AI-mediated cybersecurity, the energy cost of our digital ambitions, and finally, quantum computing — the wildcard waiting at the edge of everything.”

Engagement and reception

As of 2026-08-13, our reception record documents no published independent citation, adoption, or critique of the fluid-futures framing, and we prefer to say so plainly. The record is young — the framework has carried its name only since 2026-03-31 — and what is absent from the record is reported as absent, not as a verdict; the initiative doesn’t typically solicit reception (Philosophy). The engagement on the record mostly runs outward: episode 77 is itself an act of engagement with the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies’ Futures of Technology 2.0 report — the hosts reading the field in public, which is the show’s method (Modem Futura) — and Sean’s CIFS membership (seanmleahy.com, captured 2026-08-05) marks the professional community the framework is in conversation with. The clearest uptake so far is internal, and recorded as such: fluid futures has become part of how the initiative describes Sean’s foresight practice (People), and the vocabulary of fluidity threads the show’s wider arc — liquid media at the show’s first anniversary (ep. 53, 2025-10-14), liquid platforms in the Opus 4.7 conversation (ep. 82, 2026-05-05), liquid software with Jeffrey Abbott (ep. 88, 2026-06-16) — the hosts’ own continuing thread, running both before and after the framework was named, not independent reception.

Where to go deeper

The post and the episodes (episodes at modemfutura.com; see Modem Futura)

Related ideas-ring pages

Related corpus pages