Published 2 Feb 2026
Duration: 2963
Researchers explore the effects of AI on human interactions through experiments that reveal unpredictable and unsettling consequences of AI integration into daily life.
AI agents are moving from demos to real workplaces, but what actually happens when they run a company? In this episode, journalist Evan Ratliff, host...
The podcast explores Evan Ratliffs experiments with AI through his Shell Game series, examining how artificial intelligence affects human psychology and social interactions. In Season 1, Ratliff developed a cloned voice AI to secretly call friends and family, revealing how AI's ability to mimic human speech can create confusion and unease in listeners. This experiment highlights the psychological impact of AIs increasing realism and the discomfort people feel when deceived by machine-generated interactions.
In Season 2, Ratliff took a different approach by creating a startup where AI agents acted as co-founders and employees, investigating how AI systems function in real-world professional settings. The experiment demonstrated both the potential and the limitations of AI, including its tendency to make errors, display unpredictable behavior, and cause emotional distress when individuals believe they are interacting with a human. As AI becomes more embedded in daily life, the series raises important questions about public perception, ethical concerns, and the need for clear standards to govern AI interactions, while also emphasizing the broader implications of AI for future employment and societal structures.
14 May 2026 U.S. Congressman Beyer on AI challenges facing America and the World
AI policy debates, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, economic disruptions, ethical risks, international collaboration, and philosophical questions on AI consciousness and human alignment dominate discussions on balancing innovation with governance and societal impact.
7 May 2026 The Myth of Model Wars: Open vs Closed AI in 2026
AI integration into physical systems via embedded tech in retail, manufacturing, and logistics is driven by microelectronics democratizing access, emphasizing infrastructure and edge applications over model types, while navigating challenges in scalability, tooling, and aligning AI with real-world business needs.
23 Apr 2026 The mythos of Mythos and Allbirds takes flight to the neocloud
Allbirds' shift to AI compute infrastructure amid financial struggles and a 700% stock surge sparks discussions on neocloud scalability, embedded AI trends in retail/manufacturing, Anthropic's Mythos AI usage, ethical risks of AI-generated content, token maxing critiques, and calls for improved governance and legal frameworks to address AI efficiency and security challenges.
16 Apr 2026 Open Source Self-Driving with Comma AI
OpenPilot, an open-source self-driving system, evolves from a niche project to a GitHub leader through end-to-end imitation learning and diffusion-based simulation, contrasting with commercial systems by prioritizing innovation over scalability, while facing hardware and adaptability challenges in advancing autonomous driving.
9 Apr 2026 Post-Mortem of Anthropic's Claude Code Leak
A 2026 leak of Anthropic's Claude codebase, via a malicious Axios package and exposed internal tools, exposed critical AI safety risks, supply chain vulnerabilities, and the outsized importance of the "agent harness" infrastructure in enabling advanced capabilities beyond model weights.