Ratchet Slippage

The cultural ratchet is the mechanism Michael Tomasello identified as the foundation of human cumulative culture: each generation inherits the achievements of the previous generation, understands them deeply enough to improve upon them, and passes the improvements forward. Ratchet slippage names what happens when the inheritance happens without the understanding—when a generation receives the products of the ratchet but bypasses the cognitive reconstruction that makes those products available for the next turn. The ratchet appears to turn. Outputs exist. Artifacts are shipped. But the mechanism has lost its grip, and the rotation produces nothing beyond itself. In the age of large language models, slippage is induced by the same substitution that makes AI so compelling: the tool generates the output that the learner would have produced through the effortful process that builds understanding, and the efficiency gain is real, but the developmental gain is foregone. The developer who accepts generated code without understanding why it