Did AI steal our dopamine?

When the iPhone first got released, everyone was so excited. People can text/call their friends on it and browse web, everything from your hands. Within a few years, Apple and Android released the SDK for the app development which paved a road to infinite possibilities within the phone. That was the beginning of a new era. Eventually, the internet flooded with a lot of apps. Many of them were kinda cool and fun and also useful. But the most noticeable one was the rise of social media apps.

Facebook was one of the main examples. When it got a public release, it was cool. People can connect with other people online. As social animals, we craved it. And as the years passed, some engineers built some algorithms which hooked users inside the app for as long as possible like the infinite scrolling and various recommendation algorithms. You know how it turned out - rise of Tiktok, short videos, rise of Instagram, short focus, ...

Nowadays, the algorithm knows about you more than you know about you. Companies spend millions to keep you engaged in their platforms. As a result, they harvested our data and sold it, while we are suffering from infinite scrolling addiction. I am sure you have heard the word Dopamine, it's a neurochemical behind pleasure.

And, what I wanna talk about is AI's impact on our dopamine.

Imagine this: you are thinking about an idea that has been haunting you for some time. You decided to do it. You went to the internet to learn about that idea. Found some fun facts about it that made you laugh. Found someone else that tried the same thing but failed. So you learned how it failed. And suddenly you got an "Eureka...!" moment because you found a new way that might make you win and also make this project feels like a fun game. And then, you get stuck inside a loop of some problems, but you made it, you solved the issues. And every time you solved it, you got an "Eureka...!" moment.

Notice the "Eureka...!" moments? That was the Dopamine hit, and that is the moments that made you move forward. Without it, your progress feels boring and not exciting enough to work with. When you give the workload to a non-emotional thing, you are giving your motivation to work on it to the void. Same goes for the hobbies like coding, writing, etc. It is faster, but not fun. But do you know the reason for that Dopamine hit you got wasn't because how fast you finished the project, but rather, how you finished it?

There's an old saying...

The journey is the reward.

And the reason you don't feel as much fun doing that hobby/job is that you gave the journey to someone else. Dopamine is released mainly in the process rather than the product.

There is another side to this knife: it also kills creativity. The more you rely on the AI instead of your brain, you'll feel like an idiot when you don't get access to AI next time.

Like Charlie Munger said...

If you don't practice it, you lose it - Charlie Munger

AI is one of the best things we humans invented. It is a companion, a co-pilot for our brains. Utilize it, but never let it steal your reward. And never go autopilot.