Nest Abandonment

The oystercatcher that climbed on the volleyball did not deliberately abandon its eggs. The bird's response system tracked egg size, and the supernormal stimulus presented that feature at a magnitude the natural environment never produced. The motivational competition between the real eggs and the volleyball was not close — it was won by the feature the response system was calibrated to detect, at the intensity supernormal inflation provided. The builder who works through dinner, who cannot come to bed, whose partner has stopped reaching across the covers because the answer is always that the builder is still working, is executing an analogous program. The motivational system tracks productive-reward features; AI presents those features at supernormal intensity; the domestic ecosystem — the unoptimizable, normal-range demands of human life — loses the competition not because it matters less but because the system does not evaluate importance directly.