Muller's ratchet

AGI is supposed to be this monumental, civilization-shifting breakthrough. But what if it doesn’t arrive all at once? What if it creeps in - feature by feature - until one day we realize we’ve crossed a line? In Episode 9, we explore whether “a little AGI” even makes sense as a concept. Is general intelligence something you can scale gradually? Or is it fundamentally different from the systems we’...

he AI hype feels like it’s shifting. After months of breathless promises, tighter funding, and louder skepticism, it’s fair to ask: is the AI bubble starting to deflate? Or is this just the moment where expectations collide with reality? In this episode of Muller’s Ratchet, we unpack what people really mean when they talk about an "AI bubble"” why tech cycles always reach this uneasy pha...

Time feels deeply human. We remember the past, anticipate the future, and live in a constant flow of now. But what about artificial intelligence? In this episode, we explore whether AI can experience time at all - or whether it simply processes events without any sense of before, after, or waiting. We talk about memory, prediction, consciousness, and why “time” might mean something very different...

In this episode, we explore the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: our uncanny ability to spot nonsense in fields we know well, then immediately trust the same sources when they talk about everything else. What happens when that blind spot meets AI?

Humans argue about consciousness and free will. Then we build machines and ask them the same questions. In this episode, we explore AI conscience, philosophical uncertainty, and the strange power of ideas like Roko’s Basilisk - concepts that live entirely in our heads, yet still influence how we build the future.

RAM prices are climbing fast — again. In this episode of Muller’s Ratchet, we unpack why memory suddenly feels scarce, what’s driving the price spikes, and who actually benefits. From AI workloads to supply games, we ask whether this is just another cycle… or something more structural about how modern tech is evolving.

Websites are starting to look… the same. Flat, safe, readable — and weirdly joyless. In this episode, we talk about bland design, why personality is disappearing from the web, and what happens when sites are optimized less for humans and more for algorithms and AI readers. Is this just efficiency winning, or are we slowly designing the internet away from ourselves?

What if most of what we see online isn’t made by people anymore? In this episode, we unpack the “Dead Internet” theory - the idea that bots, algorithms, and automated content have quietly taken over the web. We talk about where the theory came from, why it feels oddly believable, and what it says about how we experience the internet today.

In this pilot episode of Muller’s Ratchet , we kick things off with a deceptively simple question: does AI know when it doesn’t know? We talk about confidence, uncertainty, and why machines often sound sure of themselves even when they’re wrong. What does it mean for an AI to “admit” uncertainty? How is that different from human doubt? And why does this matter when we’re increasingly relying on th...