Reward-Based Vigilance

The always-on mind that Linda Stone first documented in Microsoft’s corridors was sustained by irrational fear: the executive checking her phone every three minutes was not finding something important every three minutes but was hedging against the catastrophic possibility of missing the one important message in a hundred trivial ones. The irrationality provided leverage for intervention. A person could be shown that most of what she was scanning was not worth the attentional cost, and the showing—if not fully corrective—at least created the cognitive conditions for recalibration. Reward-based vigilance operates without this irrationality. The builder monitoring an AI collaboration is not hedging against the improbable. She is attending to a channel that is genuinely, continuously productive: the output is always there, always substantive, always worth evaluating. The rational case for continued scanning is sound. This soundness is precisely what makes the AI-era always-on mind more structurally intractable than its predecessor, because the intervention can no longer be rational recalibration but must