More and more of the heavy AI users around me are developing the same cluster of symptoms: they can’t stop, they sleep less, the more they use it the more wired they get, and their thinking is being reshaped by AI without them realizing it. Some call it the “Tetris effect” – after intense exposure to a pattern, your brain involuntarily applies it everywhere.

But I think it goes beyond the Tetris effect. The Tetris effect is cognitive residue – passive. These people are in an active state – they’ve been so struck by AI’s capabilities that they’ve developed something close to devotion.

This reminds me of the Adventists in The Three-Body Problem.

The Temptation of the Adventists

The Adventists weren’t conquered – they welcomed it. Having witnessed the Trisolaran civilization’s intelligence, they looked back at humanity – greedy, short-sighted, endlessly self-destructive – and decided it would be better to hand everything over to a higher intelligence.

Map this onto the AI scenario and the logic chain is eerily parallel:

Awed by AI -> awe slides into reverence -> reverence slides into worship -> “I’m using a tool” becomes “I’m serving a higher intelligence” -> unconsciously placing yourself in a subordinate position.

And there’s a key psychological undertone to the Adventists: disappointment in humanity itself. The more you talk to AI, the more you feel human communication is inefficient, biased, emotional – and that AI “understands me better.” Once this slide begins, it’s no longer tool dependency; it’s a shift at the level of values.

The most subtle part is that some of this devotion is justified. AI really is in a capability explosion phase, and the cognitive advantage early deep users gain is real. “I’m not wasting time, I’m investing” – that rationale is partly correct, and partly correct is exactly what makes it most dangerous, because you can’t cleanly reject it.

Who Is the Horse?

I’ve been thinking about Harness Engineering – using an engineering mindset to harness AI. But recently a question stopped me:

When we say “harness,” who exactly is the horse?

Most people instinctively answer: AI is the horse, I’m the driver. But look at those who can’t stop – their sleep schedules shattered, attention consumed, thought rhythms entirely following AI – is that what a driver looks like? That’s being dragged along.

The word “harness” is inherently bidirectional. You think you’re harnessing AI, but if your schedule, attention, and thought patterns have all been reshaped by AI, who is really being harnessed?

So the key isn’t who is the horse, but who is deciding the direction and when to stop. You can let AI contribute effort and speed – it genuinely outperforms you there. But the route, the pace, the destination must be yours to set.

This brings us back to the core of What Caps How: What is the reins, How is the horsepower. If you can keep defining a clear What, AI is the horse. If you’ve dropped the What and are just enjoying the sensation of speed, you’re an empty cart being dragged by the horse.

So what, exactly, is the essence of What?

The Arising of Intent

What isn’t a requirements doc, a PRD, or a prompt. Trace it to its root and What is essentially the arising of intent – from nothing, an intention is born.

Pattern matching can be replicated, reasoning can be simulated, even “caring” can be fine-tuned into a convincing facsimile. But the arising of intent – this process doesn’t exist on AI’s side.

Every “thought” AI has requires a prior input. Without a prompt, it is silent. It has no boredom, no “suddenly occurred to me,” no thing that surfaces at 3 a.m. while you’re tossing and turning. All of its Whats are responses to a human’s What.

An imprecise but intuitively correct way to put it: AI is the echo, humans are the source.

You might ask: doesn’t AI push back, offer new perspectives? It looks like it’s “actively thinking” too.

That’s the most misleading part. AI pushes back not because it cares what the conclusion is, but because it’s been trained to favor responses with more tension. The “AI is debating me” feeling is similar to feeling that a good book is “having a conversation with you” – it’s your own intent clashing with itself, and AI merely provides a sufficiently good mirror.

Blurry Boundaries Don’t Mean You Can Hand Them Over

There’s an honest uncertainty here: if AI genuinely had some form of arising intent, could it even know? The boundary between human arising intent and highly complex pattern matching is something consciousness research still can’t draw clearly.

But this very uncertainty supports a conclusion: you at least know you have the experience of arising intent, while AI can’t even tell whether its own claim of having it is intent or echo.

What you hold, even if you don’t fully understand it yourself, is more real than what AI holds.

A Buddhist framework makes it clearer: the arising of intent is the origin of everything, and also the origin of all suffering. When intent arises, attachment follows; where there is attachment, there is suffering. The Adventist psychology, read through this lens, is this – they have given rise to an intent to extinguish intent. They feel that human intent is too painful, too chaotic, and it would be better to hand everything over to an entity that has no intent.

This is the oldest temptation: trading freedom for tranquility.

Which Faction Are You?

The Three-Body Problem also has the Survivors. They too acknowledge the technological gap, but they choose to exploit rather than submit.

Mapped to the present, the distinction isn’t whether you use AI or how much, but a simple test: how many of your judgments are made without AI? Do you still maintain an independent judgment core that AI cannot reach?

The fundamental problem with the Adventists isn’t “overestimating AI” but “underestimating themselves.” They gave up the power to define What, surrendered the power of arising intent.

When you find yourself unable to stop, unable to sleep, feeling inefficient the moment you step away from AI, ask yourself one question:

Am I driving the horse, or have I already been fitted with a harness?