I recently signed up for Junie - that's JetBrains' Cursor equivalent, an agentic AI coding plugin for the IDE. You tell it what you want and then it does it. My first thought was "Oh I'll just get it to do a rough outline for me then I'll fill in the details myself." But then the first rough outline was missing some things, so I iterated. Then it was basically working, just missing some things, so I iterated again.
After a dozen iterations, it was really clear to me that I was stuck in the intermittent reinforcement - aka the "just one more" - loop. This is the basic mechanism that drives addiction.
Addiction is basically where your prefrontal cortex gets short circuited out of the brain's reward system. The reward system is this kind of phased feedback loop between the PFC and the basal ganglia, the central tegmental area and the thalamus.
The PFC is the bit that does the "thinking" this article is talking about, the "putting together" of disparate pieces of information to make new information that then goes back into the reward system to shift the goals involved in reward seeking.
This is that feeling you get of "losing sight" of the "bigger picture" and it's responsible for a lot of social ills - we don't just get addicted to drugs, this basic mechanism, the tightening of that feedback loop, is involved in everything we do, whether that's exercise or eating or work or relationships, it's when these things become unhealthy.
Tech already does a lot of really bad things to our brains in this area. Doom-scrolling is the most famous example at the moment. So unhealthy, but we can't even stop ourselves - that's what an addiction looks like.
My biggest concern is that this is what AI is doing. All the big AI houses made their models free to use, and consumers lapped it up. We got hooked. The first hit is free, you see what I mean? Then they bump the price up. By the time they do so, it's too late - we need it.
