Flash Forward

Welcome to season two of Flash Forward! We kicked off this season with a pretty unlikely future: the entire world goes face blind.     In the episode we discuss what causes face blindness — also known as prosopagnosia — and the tricks that people use to r

Right now there’s a whole lot of buzz about sex robots. Some people are really excited about them, and think we’ll be marrying robots by 2050. Other people are really worried about them, and are organizing whole campaigns against sex robots. This week, we

Today we travel to a future without lies. What would it be like if we all wore accurate lie detectors around all the time?    In this episode we talk about when children learn to lie, the different social functions of lying, and what might happen if we co

Today we travel to a future where humans have decided to eradicate the most dangerous animal on the planet: mosquitos. How would we do it? Is it even possible? And what are the consequences?     Mosquitos have worked hard to earn the nickname “deadliest a

Today we travel to a future where your microbiome becomes a key part of your identity. From health to your child’s kindergarten, here are all the ways knowing about your microbiome might impact your life.     Let’s start with a definition: what is the mic

Today we travel to a future full of spreadsheet approved lives. A future where everything we do is tracked and quantified: calories, air quality, sleep, heart rate, microbes, brain waves, finances, happiness, sadness, menstrual cycles, poops, hopes and dr

Today we travel to a future without pets. What would it take for us to give up our fuzzy, slithery, fishy friends? Should our pets get more rights? And if we didn’t have dogs or cats, would we domesticate something else to take their place?    This week's

Today’s episode is a minipod, a smattering of time travel, future travel, and news about the show.    In this episode we hear a bunch of messages from listeners: what folks think about past futures we’ve been to, and future futures we should travel to.   

Today we travel to a fully digital world, a world where paper is a thing of the past.     On this show we’ve tackled a huge range of futures — we’ve talked about things that are extremely likely, like, antibiotic resistance, and we’ve also talked about th

Okay, you asked for it, and I finally did it. Today’s episode is about conscious artificial intelligence. Which is a HUGE topic! So we only took a small bite out of all the things we could possibly talk about.    We started with some definitions. Because